I just finished a week of hard work and long hours. I want to share the experience with you because it clearly shows how stopping and planning can help you.

The task

We had to prepare a proposal for  a complex system.  The competition was expected to be high, so our proposal had to be high quality.  We have been working on the concept for this system for a long time, so we had a clear view of what the system should look like.

The challenge

We only had 3 weeks to prepare everything.  We had to discuss the solution with several areas in our company and with a subcontractor.  By the time we had everything agreed, we only had less than two weeks to produce the documentation.  The amount of required documents was larger than we expected, which made things even more difficult.

The plan

We knew all the documents we had to prepare and the clock was ticking.  So what does your body do?  It forces you into action!  For a second we were tempted to start working, because we knew already what we had to do.  But did we really?  We had a mental list of the documents and a preliminary distribution between the (at that time) 2 persons working on the proposal.  But we realized that wasn’t enough.  So we stopped, wrote all the documents on a whiteboard and made an estimation of how long it would take to finish each of them.  The result was shocking.  If our estimation was correct, we had to work over 16 hours a day to meet the deadline!!

Thanks to this 10 minute planning, we had the arguments to convince our boss to give us another person to work full time on the bid and distribute some tasks among other people in the department.

The execution

One of my colleagues had the idea to keep the list of documents on the whiteboard and write the progress at least twice a day to monitor if we were on track.  I have to say that it was a great idea, and not for the progress monitoring, that we could have done in a different manner.  But it was for the motivation.  Every time someone stood up and increased one of the percentages we had a rush of excitement and we knew we were making progress.  And whenever someone felt overwhelmed, we could look up at the whiteboard, check the status and see what the objective progress was.  And most of the times the situation was better than what our mind told us, especially when we were tired.

The conclusion

Even when you know that you should plan, it’s easy to rush into action without much thought.  And we should avoid it.  See what 10 minutes did for us.  Hadn’t we stopped then, we wouldn’t have had the extra help and our technical proposal would have been poor.

And this shows that planning is helpful for every task we have to do.  Some people tend to think that only project managers should plan and monitor progress.  But the truth is, if you plan your everyday tasks you become much more productive because you manage your time instead of spending it.

So, every time you feel overwhelmed by all the work you have to do, please don’t just jump into action.  Stop and plan first.

One of the most important jobs of the project manager is to delegate project tasks. This is specially important when the project manager has a heavy technical background. It these cases, the temptation to do something because you can do it (and you are comfortable doing it) is very strong. Most of us (if not all) have been there before, and we find lots of reasons to justify what we are doing:

• I can do it much faster than anyone else
• The quality will be better if I do it
• There is no one else who can do it, or they are very busy
• I don’t have time to ask someone else to do it

The truth is that all this reasons are excuses, and while in the short term it might work, the result in the long term is negative.

Think about it.  Are your reasons the real problem?  Or are there other underlying reasons?  Let’s analyze some of them:

• I can do it much faster than anyone else:   it might be true today.  But aren’t you doing it because it is easier than teaching someone else?  Or even worse, are you afraid that the person you teach will do it better than you in the near future?
• The quality will be better if I do it:  when you say better, do you mean your way?  or maybe you had bad experiences in the past because you didn’t specify well enough what you wanted.  And in that case it is normal that you don’t get what you expected
• There is no one else who can do it, or they are very busy:  was this task planned?  Was it assigned to someone?  In many cases this reasoning shows a lack of planning.
• I don’t have time to ask someone else to do it:  this sounds similar to I don’t have time to plan.  Teaching someone else to do something is not a waste of time, it’s an investment!  Think of the time you will be able to save in the future having this person well trained.

And you also have to think that the more indispensable you are, the more difficult it will be take advantage of new opportunities, such as a promotion or a new interesting project in your department.  Do you think your boss will let you go if there is no one ready to take over?

I hope I convinced you to delegate more.  It is not easy, but in the end it is very rewarding for you, and for the person you trust to delegate to.

“I can’t afford to stop to plan.  We have to start working if we want to meet the deadline”

How many times have you heard this?  I still shiver every time I hear it, and I hear it much more often that I would like.

It must be something innate to think that you have to start doing something when you feel you don’t have enough time to finish a task or project.  But hey, planning is actually doing something!  But then someone argues that you can finish your project without planning, so if you don’t plan, you save some time and finish earlier.  (Deep breath…)  OK, you start working right away but, in which direction?  Do you even know what you have to do?  Have you defined the scope of your project?

I have seen (and I am afraid I will see) too many people rushing into action to save time, to discover later that they have worked in a wrong direction.  And when you get to that point it is usually too late to get the project delivered on time.  A lot of people don’t realise how important a good planning is.  It helps you discover the dependencies between tasks and find out what the critical path is.  And knowing that allows you to focus all your effort on the tasks that drive the delivery date.

So no matter how tempted you are to start working without a plan, please stop and plan your work.  It will pay off!