What if you don’t know where to start?

What if you’re perfectly happy to plan (to try and avoid the failing bit) but you don’t really know how to go about it.

Well, then hopefully this article is just the nugget of planning wisdom that you need.

Note: This article comes from another reader question, this time from Irnya who asked for: “anything to do with how to divide big challenges into small ones to allow better planning.” As we’ve had a few questions now on planning, here is an article on that subject. If you have a particular topic you’d like us to cover, get on the list if you’re not already then drop us an email and let us know.

Not the most exciting topic in the world but one which we all need from time to time – so let’s try and keep it snappy and I’ll give you a concept which should help you right away with a couple of examples…

Beyond not planning at all (which we could say is level 0), I reckon that there are three levels, or stages of maturity when it comes to planning.

Maturity Level 1: How NOT To Plan

Unfortunately, this is probably how most people create a project plan.

(Who can blame them? Nobody ever told them any different).

… and it can work when people are already very familiar with what needs to be done and just need to put it down on paper for others to see, or with some guessing and a lot of luck.
Here’s how it goes:

You open up your favorite planning tool of choice – whether that’s MS Project, Basecamp, a spreadsheet or a piece of paper and a pencil and you start writing.

You start at the top and write in a fairly linear sequence all of the things that you can think of that you might need to do. Then you look back at the complete list and you may do a little re-jigging, inserting things higher up or re-shuffling the order a little.

But essentially you write it out as best you can from start to finish.

With this method you are going to be very lucky (or it’s a very simple project) if you don’t get hit with a few surprises.

Maturity Level 2: Working Backwards From The End – In Terms of Time

You realize that you have a year to complete this project you’re working on.

The first linear method with the finger in the air estimates for the duration of each activity either had you ending up way short of a year (in which case you probably under-estimated significantly and put time in the wrong places) or more likely took you way over the year that you have (in which case you over-estimated significantly and put time in the wrong places).

Either way, method 1 doesn’t make the most effective use of the time you really have for this project.

So you realize that you will be much better working out how much time you have for each major part of the project, working back from the end of the year.

This is a much better way to plan. Significantly better in terms of managing your time and focusing on what needs to be done, by when.

Maturity Level 3: Working Backwards – In Terms of Scope

Even better than working backwards in terms of time is working backwards in terms of scope – i.e. what you need to do/make/build.

In the Prince2 project management methodology (and I think also in PMI’s Project Management Professional (PMP) framework) this is known as Product-Based Planning (in case you want to look it up for further research).

It involves starting with the end result you want (e.g. our house in the example above) and breaking that down into component pieces (again, in Prince2 terms for all you budding Project Managers out there, that’s the ‘Product Breakdown Structure’).

In laymans terms that’s simply giving yourself a mechanism to cover 100% of what needs to be done without missing any pieces (a bit like ‘chunking down’ in NLP terms).

Where you place things is not as important as brainstorming everything that need to be there.

This approach is amazing at getting you a really complete picture of what it is you are building with your project and will work just as well for a piece of software as it will for an event such as a wedding as it does for building a house, or a car, or a kitchen.

The next step is to look at what activities are needed to produce the various components (which in Prince2 terms is creating a “Work Breakdown Structure” from your “Product Breakdown Structure”). This list or hierarchy of activities is then organized in the correct sequence and forms your plan.

You can then combine the product-based planning approach with looking at the available time you have to see how much time is available (and whether it’s realistic) to complete each component.

So working backwards is a much better way to go, it’s already much better than just blurting out a plan from the top of your head or the best of your knowledge to work backwards with the time you have (and time-box it if necessary and the type of project you have is suited to that approach).

Note: There’s a lot more we could discuss on the subject of planning such as estimation techniques for planning activities but that’s outside of the scope of this article (ha ha, sorry I couldn’t resist that) and the topic for another day.

Once you have your work breakdown structure you can add to that under each component how much time you want to allocate to it and how much of your budget you want to allocate to it.

Using this approach you are also able to account for all aspects of the project which again helps with avoiding nasty surprises and is very difficult with the first and most typical method of planning.

The reason it’s better to work backwards in terms of scope instead of just in terms of time is that this process is really powerful in terms of getting you to think through all of the ‘pieces’ you need. It provides a very logical framework to do that and will give you much more chance of completing whatever your project is with fewer surprises.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on.