@Dina, ha, love the quote and its SO true!!! It’s also true about management often wanting to skip a proper planning stage, but I think they have their own set of pressures like cash flow and wage payements that. It’s a constant balancing act I think and that we just have to do our best as PMs to prove the value of planning with every opportunity we get.

@Ed, A mashup of traditional PM skills is most defintely a perfect description! The fact that web project management is such a mashup is what really inspired me to start this blog. I just could’nt find anyone talking about the “real” web pm role in small digital agencies today!

Thanks for your comments all…

Digital/web media is at a disadvantage in many respects, as the industry has been spawned in a lot of cases out of small operations where project planning and management come as a secondary consideration.

Now, several years down the line, as many agencies grow and projects grow with them, planning and management of projects is becoming recognised as a greater priority and rightly so.

Due to the nature or digital/web development, it sits outside of many conventional methodologies and requires an application of a mashup of methodologies in many cases. Or the application of specific methodologies to certain projects and others to others.

But planning, and then management of that planning is essential, even if it is just the oversight to know what’s going on and where everything should be in it’s cycle.

Common sense, experience, a level head, ability to manage multiple tasks and soft skills come before any methodology for me.

I completely agree with what you’re saying, and one of my new favorite quotes is this one I got from a requirements book I’m reading: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when do you have time to do it over?”

Yes, in the small agency world we definitely feel the push to get moving quickly and management doesn’t always recognize the importance of good early planning. Until it’s too late, and then the team loses time going back and figuring stuff out.

Also, as for making estimates/schedule for the tasks in the beginning, it can be very difficult to make good estimates for tasks that might not be clearly defined yet, or are further along in the project. So, best approach in my opinion is to make a ranged estimate and then revise as the work involved becomes more clear. The hours required and schedule will be in a wider range in the beginning but narrow as the project continues.

The appropriate level of planning will always help not hinder delivering the project. I think the key here is ‘appropriate’. Project planning gets a bad name from those who believe that…
1 The schedule/gantt chart etc = the plan
2 The quality of the plan can be measured by how many lines the schedule has.
We’ve all seen people hefting around their 3000 line gantt chart which stipulates that Bob will complete task no. 2846 in six months time at 3.47 on a Tuesday afternoon! Does it ever turn out that way? Of course not. When you plan a bike ride you don’t plan for the fact that there may be a pot hole 3 miles ahead – you plan a basic route then keep looking ahead far enough to avoid obstacles before you hit them.

Unfortunately many people equate project planning with the 3000 line scenario above.

For me planning is more about ‘walking through’ the project in your head, anticipating the big issues which will need to be resolved now and the small issues which we need to look out for on the way. Its the process of planning and working out the best way to approach the task at hand that’s important not the pieces of paper which you end up producing.

When we plan we are working through what the end result must be; deciding the best way to get there; building in sufficient checks that we don’t go off on a tangent; and anticipating the stuff that could trip us up so we can have something up our sleeve ready to deal with it.

You don’t get a second chance with a project – its always a unique “one off” – that set of things, for that client, for that reason etc. You wouldn’t put on a play without a dress rehearsal so why do we get our heads down and start ‘working’ on projects without the ‘mental dress rehearsal’ that an appropriate amount of planning gives us?

Cheers
@JimAnning