Achieving Value with Planning

Project planning is pervasive and widespread in the IT industry, but there is a common misunderstanding of its real value and purpose. Meeting the project schedules and timelines is all too often seen as the only measure of project success. The result is that planning becomes extremely conservative, project budgets are bloated, standards are kept deliberately low, and project decisions are driven by project plans rather than by sound business reasons.

Good planning is primarily about informing the plan authors about objectives, resource requirements and risk. Only when planning is thorough, is it possible to understand what these really mean. Without good planning it is hard to understand what should be done and who should do it. For example it is common practice in movies to plan a scene in detail, because that is the only way to assemble all the crews and equipment necessary to actually shoot the scene.

Plans do help predict the future, but their value lies in getting the most out of resources and making adjustments as necessary when planning assumptions fail (which is the norm). Aggressive but realistic planning assumptions allow projects to be staffed with small, lean teams; resources are allocated to projects only when needed or when failed planning assumptions require a boost in resources.

For the highest staff utilization, best practice is to plan so that half the projects will exceed their initial estimates, but to compensate by maintaining a reserve of skilled staff which can be allocated to projects as necessary. This allows organizations to achieve both low delivery cost and timely delivery.

Lean teams are only possible with good planning. Otherwise, it is difficult to know when and how to make adjustments in time to meet customer commitments or to adjust for risk actualization. Some customers may also be willing to trade off delivery dates for lower prices, if they are given the choice.

Common industry practice is to lock up excess resources early in a project. This means either that the project is carrying unnecessary people OR it can't start because the people required are just not available. Organizations which can use planning as described have a decisive, strategic advantage which cannot be easily duplicated.

IT Metaphors

Metaphors are powerful concepts that help organizations understand what they are doing and what they need to do well. The right metaphors can be extremely helpful, but the wrong metaphors can hurt.

IT organizations often use the wrong metaphors. To illustrate, consider the automobile industry. There are manufacturers, dealers, customization shops, repair shops, insurers and many others. On the customer side, there are individual buyers and fleet buyers.

Each of these organizations has a different focus, set of goals and performance measures. Manufacturers, for example, have to deal with challenging design and vehicle construction problems. These require a very complete and disciplined process. On the other hand, a fleet operator is charged with purchasing vehicles from manufacturers and dealers that satisfy the demands of the business users of the fleet. Fleet operators need to manage the fleet to keep the fleet in a good state of repair. Major and minor repairs as well as custom jobs are performed by fleet mechanics in their own repair shops.

Fleet management, is very different from manufacturing. Why then do IT organizations act as if they are in the manufacturing business rather than the fleet management business? IT organizations often have elaborate software development processes, showing how to build systems from start to finish. The processes for purchasing new systems, selecting a technology or keeping existing systems in a good state of repair are seldom as complete.

IT shops need to change their dominant metaphor and act like they are fleet managers, rather than manufacturers of systems. This would help focus on the real problems in IT today, systems which fall into a state of disrepair and don't serve the needs of the business