TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

Giant A0 print outs

We’ve seen them all: project plans that fill up a square meter. Those are definitively not ok. If you cannot print your plan on an A4, there is something wrong about your plan. I can go along with an A3, but that’s about as far as I would go.

Of course if you print all activities to build a hospital, conquer Iraq or even build a database driven website you can easily fill a square meter. But you shouldn’t do that because:

• Nobody is interested.
• They fall down and thank god if they do because they get hopelessly out of date.
• You cannot view structure in a plan of a square meter.
• People think you are a show-off.
• It wastes paper…

Instead, build up your plan in layers. Break big projects up in sub projects, sub projects in work packages. Make sure you have the minimal set of dependencies between each work package and subproject. Consider maximum 10 or 15 subdivisions per layer. If you need more, it is usually a sign you need to think about the contents of your work packages or sub projects.

Page breaks are wrong, or not set

Last year we worked for a customer who had outsourced a big SAP implementation. We suspected that the company did not have detailed plans, so we asked to view them. After the usual excuses and delays, we got an email with some mpp’s in. But when we printed them, we noticed it had still all the default page breaks. A clear sign it had never been used.

Spend time on your plan’s look and feel. Divide the plan in sections so it prints out nicely. Make it pretty. Use concise and dear language. Remove the legend. Ideally, try to fit the plan on one page wide and multiple pages tall. Adapt the timescale of the Gantt chart accordingly. Make it look great on paper.

No milestones

Believe me, they exist: plans with a long series of tasks, without any milestone. This is maybe a sign that people are lacking a good tool to do issue tracking or to-do list follow-up.

If this is the case, you might as well dump it in excel, it’ll save you a lot of hassle. Connect tasks that together accomplish something with a milestone. If you need a formal go ahead from your steering committee, boss or customer before you start, you got another milestone.

No story

Each plan should tell a story. It is like a book with chapters. Do this test:

1. Take the plan of the project you are currently working on,
2. collapse all tasks beyond level 2, and
3. now look at the top level tasks.

Suppose you know nothing about the project, can you tell what it is about, does it tell a story. Does it have a good ending?

Make sure your plan has a logical look and feel, independent of what level of tasks you expand or collapse. A good trick is to use a product breakdown, instead of a work breakdown. This is an Prince2 inspired technique we have talked about before

If you know other signs that a project plan is good/bad, write a comment and share it with the rest of us!