Planning to make a plan

One of the things I see continuously in this job is plans. Microsoft Project plans. Some are good. The majority of them are very bad. The ones that are good have a good structure, milestones, dependencies and have obviously had a lot of thought put into them. That makes them particularly uninteresting for the purpose of this blog!


My aim for this post is to talk about the poor plans, and specifically one aspect on them - lack of conceptual plans.


Let us take a step back for a moment. Imagine a world for a project manager that is essentially perfect. You have complete control of the resources working for you. You can accurately quantify all of the work that is to be performed, you can build in an adequate contingency level and don't have to worry about costs. Sounds perfect right? Wrong. You've missed something - your dependencies. Every project has them, regardless of how self contained it may seem. It might be talking to the business, it may be getting sign-off from the customer that what you have delivered fits the requirements, but eventually you will have to go outside your project team, and that's when things go screwy.


You see, the biggest mistake most project managers make (and I do mean biggest) is to jump straight into dumping a plan into MS Project. Wrong! You can't do it like that. Or if you do, you need to be very lucky!


The first, and absolutely most important aspect of writing a project plan is to create a conceptual plan first. This needs to show the following:

• The major deliverable artefacts of the project
• The workstream responsible for the delivery of that artefact
• Dependencies for that artefact

The simplest way to do this is with a simple flow diagram. One box per artefact, lines to show dependencies, colours to signify workstreams. Once you've produced this, give it to your workstreams to review, you'll be amazed at how much discussion comes out of something so simple; how many dependencies you hadn't considered; how many artefacts you missed originally.

Now imagine you hadn't performed this task. Each workstream has gone off and produced a project plan to no agreed overall plan. Plan A has included a dependency on Plan B that Plan B isn't even aware of. Project Manager C thinks Project Manager D is responsible for Artefact Z and things are falling through the gaps all over the place.

So when you next kick off a project, or are asked to create a project plan, ask yourself "where's the conceptual plan" - it might just save you a whole load of trouble!

What will be this year's killer app?

Last year's killer app for me, without a doubt was Spotify. Especially once I got my Android phone and could take it with me. What I think Spotify got completely right was their delivery of the entire package. It was immediately obvious what the app was for, how to use it and why it was better than the alternatives.

Now, while I love my Android phone, at the moment I don't use much on a regular basis apart from the standard phone, email, Internet browsing and Spotify. What I fully expect is that this year there will be another killer app that I will be using on a more than ad-hoc basis. So I got to thinking where I think this app will sit.....

For me, it's got to be education, specifically around game-playing education. I'm always looking There are some good web-based learning apps out there, but there's still nothing for me for the mobile (at least on Android!) to fill this gap. There are vocab tests etc, but no complete app that really allows people to learn properly. This is a surprise for me and I expect this to be an area that develops in a big way.

Fred Wilson thinks that gaming is going to be a big growth area too. I'm not going to argue with Fred (he's far too clever!), but for me, gaming is just not a massive hole on my mobile phone. I play a couple of small apps - Sudoku, etc. but I don't feel the need to play socially (never got into that on Facebook). I can imagine this could be a massive area this year, but it won't be on my phone!

Finally, I think Finance is the big growth area. NatWest have released an iPhone app, and I expect other banks to follow suit. Once I can do banking from my phone, all I need is some sort of eWallet and I'm a happy bunny :-)

What I'm really hoping for though, is for a completely left-field app to come along that knocks my socks off and that I never knew I needed!