Beginnings

Occasionally I start projects too quickly.

Just dive in, head first, let's get to the fun part of creating.

As a result, sometimes I go rushing past the important foundations the creative is built upon, and end up backtracking to make things right. Time and money are lost. I feel like a dork.

I see this on large projects, too. The group rushes to get things built without fully fleshing out what the end needs will be. Costly adjustments have to be made on the fly. Time and money are lost.

The concept of premortem is appropriate for situations like this. At the start, the team visualizes all the ways the project can fail, then attempts to mitigate the various risks. The chances of success rise as a result.

The end should always influence the beginning.

Lulls

Everyone has lulls in their workflows- periods where the volume slows down a bit. While its nice to stop and take a breath, its also a great opportunity to look at your back-burner projects.

Make some calls. Schedule some lunches. Take the online tutorials you've been meaning to learn.

The key is to always have things on the back-burner list, so when the opportunity presents itself you have lots of ideas other than "Cruise Facebook". You need a plan for the slow times, too.

Peter

Planning To Be Ordinary

I had a conversation once with a manager of a fast-growing start-up. It had a self-service design, which required a fair amount of training and hand holding of customers at the beginning, but became mostly automated once the initial learning curve was climbed.

I asked how the follow-up interactions were going once a customer was up and running.

"We don't reach out once things get worked out."

"Why not?"

"Because if we reach out once a week now, when we are double our size six months from now we'll only be calling once a month at best, so the customer will perceive the quality of their service has gotten worse. We can't scale service like that, at least not while we're growing."

Translation: Said Manager was planning on interacting as little as possible with his clients to avoid the impression of quality service, which may be construed as the company caring about its customers. Wouldn't want that.

The Manager was unwilling to scale staff to maintain a level of service, because he was looking at an automated cash cow, and exceptional service in the form of additional staff would ruin the margins. Wouldn't want that, either.

The start-up probably isn't going to make it for a variety of reasons- but I suspect the Plan To Be Ordinary didn't help.

Peter

Plans

Do you want to do something with your life that's different from what you are doing today? What is it?

More importantly, what steps would you need to take to get there?

Which step can you take today?

Begin. Now.

Peter

Detail

Contrary to your instincts, it is possible to have too much detail in planning. Life is not a stage play where you have control of every actor and element. You can't account for the randomness of life.

Your thought process needs to be a bit more in the "If-Then" structure, as opposed to the "A-B-C" sequence we gravitate towards. Every moment has a series of possible actions, some more appropriate than others. Choose the one that makes the most sense at that moment, see what happens, then make another choice.

Planning out every possible event response will drive you batty, plus prevent you from doing actual work.

Peter

Bold

Even though I argue a bit of the opposite yesterday, I believe the best plans are made in big, bold strokes.

Too much detail and subtlety gets in the way of people understanding the plan, and it slows implementation. Don't immediately start peeling the onion so everyone can marvel in your brilliance. Talk about the plan in big picture terms, let everyone get their arms around it, and later start discussing what it means to the front line.

Of course, this requires a healthy amount of trust in your staff to make reasonable decisions (notice I didn't use "right decisions"). If you have hired bright, resourceful and responsible staff, they should be capable of handling some latitude in the decision making processes of their jobs.

If they can't, either you need different staff or different processes. It really is that simple.

Peter

Theory

Conceptual physicists believe there is a Theory Of Everything- one nice neat way to tie together the universe, which works in opposite ways at the biggest and smallest scales.

That is a very human urge, and we're good at it: looking for simplicity in noisy environments, latching onto random bits of data as the explanation for larger events, or simply picking out evidence that supports what we want to be true.

Many grand plans, designed as simple solutions to problems, often fall apart during implementation as the dirty reality on the ground doesn't fall neatly into line. While the Grand Plan may act as a guide in daily decision making, their are simply too many details to shoehorn into neat policies.

Organizations who try to be too simplistic may feel good at the roll-out, but will struggle when human nature begins to weigh in.

Peter

Plans

My judgment of leadership skills is often driven by performance when things fall apart.

Being well-prepared is fairly easy, and when things work success is usually achieved. But sometimes things just go bad- someone screws up, something stops working, a delivery is missed, etc. What happens next is what matters.

Some leaders freeze up. They just can't develop a plan on the fly, even in a just-get-through-the-next-moment way. This goes back to their original planning, as Plan A was dependent on everything working in the right way the first time. It's foolhardy to think that way, because something always goes wrong. It just does- accept it and develop plans that mitigate the damage that occurs.

This does not mean you must think through every possible option out twenty steps like some kind of multi-dimensional chess. That is bad leadership of another kind.

But when that moment happens you must rely on experience of what worked in the past and a quick judgment of your present options. Pick one. Observe how it plays out. React to it by making another step. Maybe you steer the whole thing back to Plan A, maybe not. But improvise a plan and roll with it. It will probably be fine.

If you and your team are really good, the folks paying the bill won't know anything went wrong.

Peter

Seldom Too Much Planning

My current project is suffering from too little planing on the front end, which is making it expensive on the back end.

I am amazed at how often this happens.

The cheapest part of the project is the planning phase. It involves a limited number of people and hardly any materials, so the cash costs are few, yet most projects spend too little time in this phase. For some reason it doesn't feel like real work, or something that is to be endured rather than as a crucible to refine the project before the first egg is broken.

You wouldn't begin building a house without first knowing exactly what each room is going to look like, yet jobs routinely begin with at only a napkin sketch of the finished product. While this can be successful, the odds of big cash costs and emotional trauma are large.

In short, I'm not sure I have ever worked on a project that was over-planned. I definitely willing to find out.