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Showing posts with the label plans

GOAL is a four letter word, forget it, think what are your priorities?

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A bit extreme I know but let me explain. This month many of us are busy trying to get a good head start on our resolutions or goals set at the beginning of the month.  Maybe you are using this month to set those goals, be they at work or at home.  Or the HR department is looking an annual objective.   My challenge to all this is what is the point in setting goals if you do not know your priorities.  I will take a home example, say I decided to set my self a goal of training for and completing an Ironman race.  Great stretching "SMART" goal and I expect this or something similar is being set all around the world.  BUT if you then take a step back and consider what are your priorities for the year it may be that spending time with your family is the highest priority for the year.  If that's the case, training for an Ironman is likely to take you away from your family more than the previous so as a goal on it's own it does not seem to make sense.  it may be

Plans, plans everywhere, and not a gantt to be seen

Archtects use drawings. Coders use a program. Accountants use spreadsheets. Sales and marketing use PowerPoint.u Why are there so many different ways to pull together a plan and why do we as project managers get twitchy if it is not in a gantt chart? Does if matter? I say NO . Why? Because as long as all the stakeholders and team members are happy with this form of communication and it includes the key info, i.e.who does what by when and who needs it done. If this is the case then who cares.

Plans are not just for the project team

When talking to one of my project managers about plan compliance it hit me that plans are not just the tool by which the PM manages the project and communicates to their team,but also the basis for corporate, customer and stakeholder updates. It sounds obvious but having all project planning to a corporate standard is not just about some ivory tower indivdual setting standards without knowing what it is like at the coal face but about being able to see a total view of project delivery for the whole organisation. The clarity came after listening to podcast by Manager Tools, they recently talked about how each task we handout or is handed to us includes reporting on completion and, if it is a long enough task progress reporting. Reporting is part of the task, not an addition, so it follows that a plan updated on a weekly basis is part of the project not an overhead. We have all undoubtably had the conversation with team members that if they did not have to report on what they wer