Promote My Site

Ah, plans are wonderful things - if only reality were more sensitive towards the tender ego of the planner! In twenty five years of planning projects I’ve never had anything with a horizon longer than three months and three people actually work. (Don recently wrote a good post on that: Only Try To Predict The Near Future.)

So why have I been around 85% successful in delivering tricky software projects and complex operational systems? Well, I think that I have an innate talent for finding the critical path and a good hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck system for sensing when things are going horribly wrong. Plus I’ve been known to sandbag (cough cough) on my initial plans.

But mostly I replan pretty frequently.

“You mean you slip your dates?”

Nope, I replan.

Let’s take a real world example from when I was working as a consultant to an upstart telco that was working on their backoffice to reduce overhead. There were three consultants, eight client developers, a documentation person, a test person, and a client side business analyst. I had a month leadin time to build an executive level (read: PowerPoint) plan for buyin purposes.

I quickly categorized this as a very high risk project because of the length of the plan, the client’s culture, the mix of in-house and consulting resources, etc, etc. So I structured the plan as a series of overlapping projects so that we’d have successes surrounding any failure.

Then, at the midpoint of each project and right before any new project launch, we’d spend a few hours going over the plan, changing dependencies, removing/adding features, etc, etc. We also used this time to change dates and deliverable due to the business changing what they needed - 18 months being a fairly long time in the telco world.

We were on time with all but one section, so in the project management world that is pretty much sweeping the world series.

You’ll note that we did not do what most people think of when they hear replan: add people or slip dates. Replanning is much more than changing dates and resources - it is a fundamental re-examination of the project plan at that point in time!

IMHO if you just add some people in and slip the date, you’ve only put off the inevitable failure. I’ll go even farther: I’ve not seen that strategy work very well. I won’t say that I’ve never seen it work, but most of the projects where I’ve seen something that drastic were probably doomed even if they’d gotten Fred Books to come in and tell them what to do.

The other thing I’ve seen replanning do is actually to deliver more functionality over the same period of time at a lower cost. Which is horribly counter-intuitive, but sometimes you learn some pretty interesting stuff during the first part of a project.

For example, here at Promote-My-Site, we hit the halfway point in the project (it was actually the half-way point in our investment, but same diff) so we got everyone into a room and went through what we were doing from a plan perspective.

And what I mean by that is not “when will Widget_X be ready for testing?” but “Ok, Don, you should be around halfway through the backup and recovery plan at this point which means in two weeks you’ll be starting on marketing - that sound about right?”

Anyhow, we’re cutting up a bit and going through everything, and one of the guys says:
“You know, if we weren’t building Feature_X into the release, I’d be done tomorrow with the database design, and we could ditch the new pricing configurator, freeing up almost a month of work.” Hmmm. Cool. So we had a good go-round the room and talked through launch requirements. And we decided to remove an important, but not critical, feature from the launch and put it in V2. And we pulled in some small V2 features that had been moved out.

And then we re-planned the launch and decided we could launch in January(ish) instead of March/April. So we actually saved more than two months (testing was easier, etc).

So that means we will have:
-> 2+ more months of revenue from our new product
-> 2+ months less investment before go-live
-> V2 will be out more quickly
-> V2 can probably come out with customer suggested features

Look, that money saved and earned is not going into the Holy Payroll Lockbox or anything, but it’ll certainly pump up the bonuses even more on a good year - a seriously good thing for the group. It also means that Promote-My-Site will have a better chance in the marketplace, which is far more important to our company in the long run.

Replanning. It makes you look smart. Or at least less stupid.