Just when we thought we got the Project Charter figured out, the book Rework, by Jason Fried & David Heinemeir Hansson, debunks ‘Planning as Guessing’. In fact, they go on to say, “Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.”
They advocate, “…you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, ‘We’re going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense today’.”
Before you stress they do add this: “Now this isn’t to say you shouldn’t think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That’s a worthwhile exercise. Just don’t feel you need to write id down or obsess about it. If you write a bit plan, you’ll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.”
Seems to me, some planning-or having some sort of ‘general guide’ is a good thing….just as good as knowing when to make adjustments.
And Seth Godin doesn’t even want us to call ourselves Project Managers, he prefers the title: Project Runner.
