Following on from post about starting writing a book on project planning, this extract introduces planning as an approach. As ever, feedback is welcome – for corrections, comments, ideas, please add comments, contact me on LinkedIn or mail me direct (for readers who know me).
If you are reading this book, you have some interest in planning. Why not take a minute or two to get your thoughts in order about what you think planning is. Maybe talk to one or two of your friends and colleagues. After all, we have a whole book ahead of us to discuss planning methods, approaches and good practice. Let’s decide why you think it’s important enough to buy the book, and I think it’s important enough to write it. I’ll look at this at the start of the next chapter, but think about it now.
What do you think a plan is for? You’re investing time in a plan, so what do you expect to get back in return?
The four horsemen of project management
This book is designed to present a structured approach to planning which can be applied to a wide range of projects. But projects are all different and techniques will vary. The underlying structure of the book borrows from Ralph Stacey who argued that business environments can be characterised by two parameters:
Degree of certainty. – This relates to the quality of information available for decision making. Good quality information leads to rational, analytical planning.
Degree of agreement. – This relates to how much the involved people agree with the approach to be taken as a result of the information available. A high degree of agreement leads to low levels of change.
Figure 1 – Planning styles and the Stacey Matrix (from Stacey 2002)
The Stacey Matrix leads to the four key sets of project management tools for dealing with different environments. I like to think of these as “The four horsemen of project management” – Determinism, Uncertainty, Agility and Risk. In the environments towards increasing complexity the project manager must look beyond the simple predictive planning approaches. Increasingly these are the environments in which teams find themselves.
First there is the environment where there is a high degree of both certainty and agreement. This does not mean that problems are trivial. Far from it, they can be very complicated, involving large amounts of work, but the work is known, or at least knowable. This environment is what I term Deterministic Planning.
If we reduce the degree of certainty, we need to extend the planning approaches used. This is moving along the horizontal axis in Stacey’s diagram. Although we still agree what we want to do, we find that it is harder to predict what will happen as a result. Estimates are more uncertain, unexpected tasks may occur, higher defect rates and rework may be expected. The tools to look at this environment are addressed in the section on Managing Uncertainty.
The other dimension in Stacey’s diagram is the degree of agreement. As this decreases, the environment becomes fast changing as priorities shift, market needs change and customers clamour for attention. The doubt here may be all about value – what would be the best decision for the business. This is the environment which is addressed by Agile Planning.
And as both certainty and agreement reduce, the project environment becomes more complex. In this domain, a critical factor becomes the ability of the project team to anticipate and manage Risk.
Outcomes emerge in the interplay of everyone’s plans and intentions and no one can control the interplay.
Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Organizational Reality
This book focuses on the first two environments. The first chapters cover Deterministic Planning and the book then moves to techniques for Managing Uncertainty. A future book will address the approaches around Agile Planning and Risk Management in a Value-driven approach. The four approaches are discussed below in more detail.
Deterministic Planning
The basic “bread and butter” of project planning is the ability to take a problem and to build a plan to address that problem. This is covered in the first chapters of this book, which introduce the basic concepts of planning and outline an approach that can be taken to building a plan from an initial project concept through defining the project, planning the scope and activities to be completed and then building a project schedule. There are a series of techniques involved in this with which everyone involved in projects should be familiar.
This “classical” approach to projects is based on projects being highly predictive, meaning that a plan can be built and then delivery will follow the plan with a reasonable level of accuracy.
Determinism: the theory that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way
Cambridge Online Dictionary
Deterministic planning is based on decomposing (breaking down) a problem to a smaller set of problems and planning and sequencing these. In more recent years many project approaches have questioned whether projects are fundamentally predictive enough to use this approach, or to wholly use this approach. However, the techniques involve here are valuable as long as they are applied as good practices, and modified for the project being managed.
Value Principle:
While deterministic planning may not be sufficient to plan all projects, the skills are fundamental to project planning and all practitioners should be familiar with them.
Managing Uncertainty
One major issue with Deterministic planning is that planners cannot, however hard they try, predict the future. As uncertainty increases we see that a plan is a model, chosen from many alternative plans. It is used as a tool to control behaviour, through prioritisation, tracking or reporting.
Uncertainty is not a subject which is widely discussed and understood, and there are challenges in building consistency into how we manage high levels of uncertainty in an effective way. This section looks at tools for addressing uncertainty, for modelling and communicating it and for ensuring that an uncertain project has a high level of likelihood of successful delivery.
This section is intended to take the reader beyond the basic tools of project management into a better understanding of how to apply these in a more uncertain environment.
Agile Planning
“Agile” is a very over-used word in the project environment and one which can mean many things to many people. But any definitions generally agree that agility is related to change.
Agile: able to deal with new situations or changes quickly and successfully
Cambridge Dictionary Online
As the level of agreement reduces, the likelihood of change increases. Modern business environments often need something more than the classical contract-and-change approach where every re-prioritisation results in replan, expense and delay. The Agile movement has been revolutionising ideas of how to run projects in this sort of environment and this section looks at how planning is used in an Agile project, where change is embraced as a chance of optimisation, not rejected as an inconvenience. Agile Planning is not covered in this book but Value-driven approaches to Agility will be in a follow-on volume.
Risk Management
Risk Management is a central discipline to project methodologies, and covers the areas where the project team can anticipate and manage items which could impact the project. Risk is distinct here from Uncertainty as it has specific, macro events with cause and effect which can be directly managed. Risk Management is, or should be, central to good project planning – indeed there is an argument that planning itself is a Risk Management strategy. But effective Risk Management is not a trivial task and many teams struggle to anticipate areas of Risk. Risk Management is not covered in this book but Value-driven approaches to managing Risk will be in a follow-on volume.
"Ride the Waves" 
Will be checking in here often Jay – glad to see the wave analogy will live on !
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