I have become my father. (Scary, isn’t it?)
My dad used to tell me, “Julia, you don’t plan to fail. You fail to plan.”
At 19 years old, I hated hearing him tell me that. Especially when all I wanted to do was take my hard-earned $500 and try to survive in my own apartment. Let me say that now I hate to admit my parents were right — without a plan, not many things will go in your favor.
When working with an agency, for the sake of sanity for both parties, any activities done will be assigned to a project. Especially the big ones that take several months to complete, and that have lots of moving pieces.
A successful project has to start with planning at the beginning. Let me state that again. It HAS to start at the beginning. And that means taking time and carefully defining deliverables, estimating hours, and looking at schedules. Every project is different — just because it was setup one way, took ___ hours to complete and that it was delivered in a specific timeframe doesn’t mean if you did it again, it would be exactly the same. Why is that? A phenomenon known as scope creep.
Scope creep is when, over time, the desires for the project slowly start growing. It may start out as an extra sentence in a brochure, but in some cases, it can end up as 10 extra sections to a website. As if the name isn’t scary sounding enough, the worst part is that nobody may realize how bad the creep can be until it’s already out of control. So why do we care? Deadlines and budget. When things creep outside of the original project scope, you may find yourself with a larger invoice than you expected or a deadline past what you may have promised your CEO.
So how can you avoid this terrifying project management happening? Planning. Take the time to review the proposal with your account or project manager. Ask questions about the process, number of revisions, what the final deliverables will be, and what you can expect at each step of the process. Then you just have to be wary about “what if we added …?” because if it happens frequently or is large enough, you may find your project unexpectedly delayed by weeks or months.
Of course sometimes you plan and still fail, but hopefully utilizing these strategies will help keep that to a minimum. People change their minds. The deliverable may change, too. But failing to plan is the perfect way to make sure your project is doomed from the beginning. I bet my dad would be so proud.
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Comments
Great topic. These are the parts of a project that we don't usually plan for or want to deal with. It is incumbent upon the account service side to communicate changes or requests that would trigger a change order. It's also very important for project managers to alert account service when these milestones are hit. This all translates into having an honest and open relationship with clients. Typically if a client is alerted to the fact that a certain change will create a change order, they will plan appropriately to avoid it or approve it without question. It comes back to proper communication with the client. The other side is proper estimating and planning as you discussed. If this is done up front then you don't need to deal with change orders or overruns late in the project. Or is it proper resource allocation the answer? Whichever the solution, it requires good oversite by all parties to deliver on time and within budget.
Your father would be proud!