The Myth of Over Planning
There's a saying in Project Management: "you can plan for the unexpected, but the unexpected doesn't plan for you." You think you're running a tight ship: dashboards, automations, updated logs, and then it happens. An unexpected cost. A scope change. A bug that slipped through the cracks. Suddenly you're in front of leadership trying to explain how it all went wrong. It's frustrating. I know. I've been there (more times than I'd like to admit).
Too often the conversation revolves around refining the sprint cycles or the issue lifecycle, but this is not where the problem lies. Take this for example, if a basketball team knows how to run drills, shoot baskets, dunk, and defend in ideal conditions then they don't really know how to play ball. If their star player is injured or they aren't playing at home court are they really playing basketball? The same goes for project management.
PMship gets stuck in the "Good PR" and dashboard visuals of it all that it misses the main point. PMship isn't about how clean your Gantt chart looks (though important), but rather how you deal with the unexpected. The incidents, the bugs, the errors, and the frustrated client calls at 7 AM .
Some PMs work backwards and really focus on visuals and automations but they often miss having a framework to respond to incidents and unexpected scope changes. Risk management is the name of the game. What will you do if Customer A has an issue integrating while Customer B is struggling to understand the documentation? Risk management helps guide the conversation and keep the north star within sight in case things get cloudy.
Having a framework or Risk Register (see below) sets up teams and organizations on the right path. It allows the staff to come up with the right response or accept a risk before it happens. Similar to poker, it's important to know when to bow out or when to keep things moving because you've accounted for the loss or unexpected dip in performance.
It's important to have strong artifacts like dashboards and automations, but at the end of the day, PMship is about one question: what will you do when something doesn't go to plan?
Jesse Marquez - PMP, PSM, MA
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