Plan-work balance

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to working, but we cover most of it in the planning and measuring domains. What’s left to talk about working in a well-structured system is the relationship between working and plans:

• Working without a plan: Many projects don’t have a structured system, and teams simply do whatever they deem necessary, guided by a vague mental image of the whole project. There may be a plan somewhere that’s not used to direct what’s best to do (maybe it doesn’t even have the capability to do so), and the plan becomes more and more different from what’s done in the project. Sometimes, there’s a planner who struggles to update the plan, but even that’s a one-way relationship where people do their work, and then the plan is adjusted to match what they have done and what they may do in the future.
• Working without flexibility: The opposite is to have a fixed, detailed plan and force everyone to act exactly as planned. No matter how well you’ve planned, this can never be realistic because projects are complex, or at the very least, complicated.
• The balanced approach: The practical approach is to have a two-way relationship between them, where we use the plans to see what we have to do, and reflect back the facts to adjust the plans and keep them realistic.

In P3.express, for example, there’s a weekly cycle with a kick-off meeting. In this meeting, key team members or all team members (depending on the number of people) review the work planned for the upcoming week and check to make sure it’s the best way forward and that there won’t be any conflicts.

Whenever you adjust the plans based on realities, they change and give you new information. That information will then be used for measurements (discussed in the next domain) to see whether any corrective or preventive action is required.

So, there’s a constant dance between plans and working. How is this reflected in your methodology? All projects are uncertain, but some are more so. In those cases, you may have to strengthen your methodology in this area.