It is the eve of a new school year. We are busily getting ready for the first day of school for 2019. Thankfully we go to a school where everything is provided – the lunches, the books, the pens and pencils. Miss 6 tries her school uniform on and she’s grown. Oops, I will need to get a few new uniforms before the year is out.
Then the doubts set in. Did I spend enough time with here. Did she have a good time? Should we have done more? Should we have done other things? Where did the time go? What would I do differently next time?
It’s not different to a project at work. We start with a project plan. We follow it to the best of our ability and then life happens. We wonder if we should be doing other things. We wonder what we have missed. We wonder where the time went. We wonder what we would do differently next time.
Both stories have the same moral – fail to plan, plan to fail. Before the school holidays we came up with a flexible plan that met both Miss 6 and my needs and that we would look back on and be proud of our achievements. During the holidays, we tweaked our plan to ensure that we would enjoy the journey. Your project is the same. Your project plan will guide you. Your team meetings will reflect on anything that needs to be tweaked. And you should reflect back and be proud of what you have achieved.
The question is – did you fail to plan before you started the project?