Questions, questions

So you got a prospect to agree to work with you. Great!

So… what is that project going to look like?

What are you even building? Is it actually clear what the work products will be? (Don’t laugh. Maybe the customer lacks the insight to decide even that. And that’s fine. You’re the expert, not them.)

Who is going to use it?

Do you know the stakeholders? All of them?

Who calls the shots? (On paper and in reality!)

When will certain things be delivered? How?

Are you aware of the risks?

Are you really aware of the risks?

Is the customer aware of these questions, and have you explicitly reached agreement?

The answers to all these questions lie in — your project plan.

Plans. Always a good thing.

You need to find out these things before you start. Otherwise you may find them out the hard way.

If you commit everything to writing, not only will you make dealing with your customer easier. You will also be able to monitor the progress of yor project and quickly spot problems as they arise.

What should your project plan contain?

• work products — What will you be creating? Find out the properties and boundaries of the thing you are creating
• tasks — What else will you be doing? Researching, organising, …
• resources — What will you need to complete your work? People: how many? Tools: which ones?
• commitments — What do you actually agree to do?
• schedule — Now that you’ve figured out what to do — by when will you be finished?
• risks — Which potential problems are you or your customer able to identify? How do you plan to avoid them, or else deal with them once they arise?

Looking at this list, it may already have occurred to you that creating the project plan is an iterative task. The commitments, resources and schedule all influence each other.

This is not a one-shot task

Over the course of a project, new information will become available. You may spot new stakeholders, or discover new risks, or any number of other important new information.

Not only will you have to continually adjust your work to stay close to the plan, but you may also find that the plan itself has to change in order to fit the changed situation.

If you determine that the plan needs revising, you will have to do that entire evaluation again. But more importantly, you will have to get customer buy-in again.

Hard truths, right now

Another big advantage of creating a detailed project plan is that you will learn things about the project, your customer, and perhaps yourself. Before you seriously commit.

You may even notice that the project actually isn’t as great as you first thought, and you would be better off walking away.

However, this will only be possible if you dare to look at unpleasant findings, and instead of pulling back, decide to dig deeper. This can be a frustrating thing to do (maybe you are excited about this project yourself), but the truth will come to light eventually anyway. If you shy away from it now, you will just find out about the warts the hard way.

But if you get ahead of things, you have a chance to shape your future, instead of being driven by the present.

So get this right, and use it as a tool to look at the project before starting, and as a guideline over the course of your work. That way, even if things may not be easy, they will be the easiest you can make them.