In an IEEE Software 'From the Editor' column, Steve McConnell writes (at http://www.stevemcconnell.com/ieeesoftware/eic19.htm), that the nine deadly sins of project planning are:
(1) Not planning at all
(2) Failing to account for all project activities
(3) Failure to plan for risk
(4) Using the same plan for every project
(5) Applying pre-packaged plans indiscriminately
(6) Allowing a plan to diverge from project reality
(7) Planning in too much detail too soon
(8) Planning to catch up later
(9) Not learning from past planning sins
I am managing a project right now, and I just can't figure out which sin I am committing: (2) or (7)? I suppose the answer is that is depends on the project and its circumstances. But of course. It always does.
And uh, so at least now I know that these are all the deadly sins of project planning and other sins are presumably not deadly. They are merely extremely toxic, presumably. My project won't exactly die if I forget about some other practical issues, it will just go into convulsions or stop breathing for a while, or sway gently from side to side when it should be rocking.
In other words, I still have to worry about the non-fatal issues in some particular order which is highly project dependent, and these so called fatal sins have to watched out for but exactly when a sin is being committed is also dependent on the project.
Duh!
Why do these wise men write these articles with zero information? I just wasted a perfectly good 5 mins which I could have spent more usefully reading about a API, framework, or some such, that would actually have solved a few real problems.
The tenth deadly sin of project management: trying to get wisdom from anything other than hard facts when you should be doing project management: learning, building consensus, disseminating information, talking to your team, and writing code.
(1) Not planning at all
(2) Failing to account for all project activities
(3) Failure to plan for risk
(4) Using the same plan for every project
(5) Applying pre-packaged plans indiscriminately
(6) Allowing a plan to diverge from project reality
(7) Planning in too much detail too soon
(8) Planning to catch up later
(9) Not learning from past planning sins
I am managing a project right now, and I just can't figure out which sin I am committing: (2) or (7)? I suppose the answer is that is depends on the project and its circumstances. But of course. It always does.
And uh, so at least now I know that these are all the deadly sins of project planning and other sins are presumably not deadly. They are merely extremely toxic, presumably. My project won't exactly die if I forget about some other practical issues, it will just go into convulsions or stop breathing for a while, or sway gently from side to side when it should be rocking.
In other words, I still have to worry about the non-fatal issues in some particular order which is highly project dependent, and these so called fatal sins have to watched out for but exactly when a sin is being committed is also dependent on the project.
Duh!
Why do these wise men write these articles with zero information? I just wasted a perfectly good 5 mins which I could have spent more usefully reading about a API, framework, or some such, that would actually have solved a few real problems.
The tenth deadly sin of project management: trying to get wisdom from anything other than hard facts when you should be doing project management: learning, building consensus, disseminating information, talking to your team, and writing code.
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