If you or your company have not Gotten Real yet than this will hit home. I’ve been a developer / architect / project manager on a few quite large projects and over planning has occured on each and every one.
In school you learn about planning, from writing outlines before your paper in third grade to the SDLC in college IS courses. Now there’s a difference between planning for preparation and planning just to be planning.
Planning for preparation is getting a piece of paper out and mocking up a screen and user flow so when you start coding and designing you have an idea and direction. Planning should be about giving you, your designers, and your developers focus to get their job done.
When you are planning just to be planning because that’s what you learned and that’s all you know — you end up with 85 page functional spec documents that your developers and designers don’t even read – this is because a) you did not gather their input and b) it’s all fluff that will never be concrete but always change.
So, when this guy says, “People don’t ‘do’ things, they sit around for weeks talking ‘about’ what to do…”, I can totally agree. Don’t add fluff. Keep it simple and just get it done. Remember that 80% of your users will only use 20% of the functionality. So don’t spend weeks planning for something no one will use.
From Emergence Marketing:
Emergence Marketing: Why is live at work so different?
Earlier this week, he called me for carreer advise – telling me that he felt like he had landed in Dilbert cartoon. “People don’t “do” things, they sit around for weeks talking “about” what to do”, he said, “and they use all these made-up words that do not even exist in the English Language, I am going crazy!”
tags: business, management, development
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