INTRODUCTION

You will have gathered by now what our angle in all of this is: if you plan it right, then the doing will be very straightforward. The key measure of how well a project has been planned is the quality of the project plan that has been produced. In this chapter I will show you how to assess such plans your own or other people's. By learning how to do this you will stop potential disasters from becoming real ones.

As you also know by now, I am anxious to make you into not just a successful project manager, but a Lazy one. The method I will show you in this chapter will be a key weapon in your Lazy Project Manager's arsenal. If the plan is a poor one you will find out within a few minutes. Then, only if the plan is good will you spend time analyzing it more closely. The tests contained in the method described will smoke out the turkeys with the least amount of effort on your part.

As you would expect, the tests in the method are directly derived from the Ten Steps.

At the highest level there are four things you need to look for in assessing a project plan. These are:

1. That the project has a clearly defined goal.

2. That there is a plan for achieving the goal.

3. That the project has a leader.

4. That there is some sort of backup plan or room for maneuver.

All of the checks I describe will be to determine the existence or otherwise of these.

It may be convenient for you not to do all of the checks described on every plan you encounter. In particular, it might be useful for you to have a first battery of checks that a plan must pass, and only if it passes these would you analyze it further. Ideally, too, the amount of work involved in carrying out this first battery of checks wouldn't be all that great.

This is exactly the way I have organized the checks in this method. In all, there are nine checks, and these are listed in the following table. Opposite each check is an assessment small, medium, large of the amount of work required to carry out the check.

Five of the checks require relatively minor amounts of work. I suggest you use these as your first level of analysis. The five of these could probably be done in under 30 minutes.

Another three of the checks can be done with modest amounts of work. To do them all might take up a couple of hours of your time. However, as I have said already, you would only do them provided the plan being tested had already passed the 30-minute test.

The remaining check could, depending on the scale of the plan, turn out to be very time-consuming indeed. Whether or not you would do such check is, of course, entirely up to you. If you personally decided not to, it would still be important that somebody and this is most likely to be the project manager should do it. The checks we will consider are these:

CHECK	EFFORT INVOLVED
First level checks
Contents	Small
WBS	Small
Gantt overview	Small
Resource checks 1 and 2	Small
PSI	Small
Second level checks
Schedule and effort	Medium
Gantt critical path	Medium
Resource loading checks 3 and 4	Medium
Third level checks
Gantt all jobs	Large