Weak planning – It may seem like a rather elementary statement but a project without a plan is like going on a long car journey (to a destination you’ve only vaguely familiar with) without a map (or a TomTom!). I’ve been on large programmes before which have ramped up heavily to deliver before real plans are in place. From my experience this has a number of symptoms as the weak planning becomes more prevalent. Namely:

• You have teams working on activities they think will bring them towards the end goal but without the benefit of solid knowledge that they are actually doing the correct work at the correct time e.g. They deliver early and the next team isn’t expecting their output for another 4 weeks;
• You have multiple teams working on the same scope and duplicating work;
• You have teams delivering mutually exclusive elements of work but there are big gaps in what is to be delivered (in totality) as no clear WBS has been defined;
• You have some people doing NOTHING (or more likely becoming well acquainted with YouTube)…this is magnified when those individuals are expensive/scarce resources

…inefficiencies ensure and before you’ve had a chance to put out one small planning fire you’re in the midst of a severe, and widespread, inferno to which application of the metaphorical fire blanket - an A3 project plan ;-) - is far too little too late.

You may notice that the bullets above all cross-reference both people and plans…both need to be inextricably linked to control your project’s gluttony.

The key actions here are to define a WBS (as we mentioned in the Lust Deadly Sin article), schedule the activities and then once it is agreed and signed off then, and only then, start to mobilise your team to start activities. Sometimes Senior Management get disorientated in the melee at the start of a project and start the war-cry of ‘We must start delivering!’ before the project manager has had a chance to get the plan baselined (sometimes it’s the inexperienced project manager who is making the self-same war-cry!). However it is imperative that the project manager stands their ground as much as possible. Failure to do so will result in unnecessary and inefficient budget consumption. Using the journey analogy above it equates to getting lost in a series of streets minutes after you’ve started your journey and wasting valuable minutes (equating to valuable resource cost) going in circles.