The Map is not the Territory! We knew this in the 1950s but still kept torturing people with GANNTs

The point of plans is to look into the future to make sure we can do something about it now.

Once upon a time I used to pump out Gantt charts and then spend precious time with Senior Leadership trying to explain the highlights.

Over time I learnt a few home truths:

1.       Business changes all the time. Exec deal with this daily.

2.       The longer a project runs without delivering anything, the more chance it has of going sideways.

3.       Projects aren’t about delivering dates. They’re about delivering value - and the earlier the value, the better.

4.       If you are implementing a new system, the business often won’t really know what they need until they’ve actually worked with it for a while.

5.       Without an MVP, the wishlist will keep putting on weight until it sinks the ship.

6.       MVP is hard to sell - it sounds like Project ‘lite’.

7.       Aim for a Minimum Loveable Product instead - focused, but with a couple of features that put some sizzle on the product.

And I learnt to love Moving Window planning. Instead of planning the detail upfront plan for when you will need the detail.

I have delivered Data Centre moves, ERP and Infrastructure upgrades, Compliance Projects and Data and AI platforms. Serious work you can’t run off the back of a napkin.

But not all the detail needs to live in the master plan.

There are plenty of other good places to keep it: JIRA or ADO, workstream plans, vendor SoWs, trackers and delivery logs.  What I do track closely are milestones/value increments, I only show people the slice they care about.

Fortunately, AI can now help stitch a lot of this together - maintaining running project logs, comparing updates, highlighting changes and helping keep trackers current.

That means less effort maintaining a giant timeline and more time looking at what has changed, what is getting tight, when you might need to resource up and what the business needs next. 

You can spend your time endlessly updating a detailed plan, or you can spend it delivering something the business loves.

The plan will change. It’s supposed to.

Build the Minimum Loveable Product. Get it into people’s hands. Learn what happens next.  And get ready for that 1.1 release because happy customers always want more.