Planning to Fail

The project plan is the most pointless but required document any professional can write. Basically it's fortune telling, weather forecasting and prognostication all rolled up into one terribly illegible Gannt chart. Depending on how long the project runs, you have to note down to the exact date when somebody you don't know completes a task you haven't thought deeply about. It's like trying to hit an airplane mid-flight with a pea shooter in a hot air balloon.

And yet the plan is absolutely necessary, because us people tend to lose focus over a longer period of time. We forget stuff. Other things happen, that may be urgent and have to be accounted for. Planning is how we keep our feet grounded and our eyes on the prize.

Now people making the planning know they can never be 100 percent accurate, especially over a long period. There are several tactics to tackle this:

• add slack time
• descope

Either tactic is something that the people paying for the project won't like. In general people don't like to pay for somebody else's incompetence. Also people don't like to not get what they are promised.

So you have a clear tug of war here. On one side people who pay for projects, and therefore want an exact and actual planning up front. On the other, people who execute the projects, want to get paid, are only paid when they meet their planning, so the safe thing for them to do is to provide a vague, loosely coupled planning that maybe gets updated as time goes by.

Planning is hard. Planning isn't fair. It is an activity that invites discussion and controversy, and often not even about the actual contents.

Planning is pointless, and invariably absolutely necessary.