INTRODUCTION

I had a boss once, a man from the North of England. No project was too daunting for him, whether it was software development or house renovation. I used to pass the house he was then renovating on my way home from work. Often, in all kinds of weather, his children would be out helping him, shoveling, mixing concrete, carrying things.

"Make a list of jobs that need doing," was one of his favorite sayings. He would also refer to his children as "the sprogs." In work, we put the two sayings together and came up with, "Make list of jobs and give to sprogs," said in a Yorkshire accent . It seemed the only way to explain how he got so much done in his life.

"Make list of jobs and give to sprogs" “ make a list of the jobs that need to be done and you've got yourself your project plan. There's only one catch: what if you don't know everything that has to be done?

Not a problem. At the risk of boring you with references to Polar exploration, a project is just like a journey across featureless wasteland. You know where you want to end up and you know the general direction to take, but you have no idea what lies between here and there; all you can see is the first horizon. What Polar explorers do is steer for a point on that horizon. Only when you get there can you decide how to face the next bit of the journey.

Projects are exactly the same. The very first thing to do when you start a new project is to make a plan. You may only be able to write down the first one or two tasks , but you're already moving forward. Get yourself to that first horizon and then take stock of what needs to be done next. You will always know in quite a lot of detail what lies between you and that first horizon, even though there will inevitably be surprises . For the rest of the project it is enough that you have mapped out in broad terms the remaining milestones (horizons) along the way.

There will come a time when you have to predict the remainder of the project, but try to postpone that moment for as long as possible, until you have gathered as much information as you can upon which to base your decision.

In the computer industry we call these predictions SWAGs “ scientific wild-ass guesses “ but as we shall see, it's not quite as bad as that. Yes, you do have to guess, but by comparing your early guesses against what actually happened , you can start to get a feel for how accurate your guessing is and adjust your plan accordingly .

Your plan becomes the compass by which you steer the project. As you reach each horizon, you check the lie of the land and then push on to the new horizon. "Make list of jobs and give to sprogs." For us, Step 2 of our method is "Make a list of the jobs that need to be done."

The list can be in any form. It can be an actual list, like a shopping list; it can be put on to a computerized project planning package “ we do this for a lot of our software projects; it can be a chart. Many large companies have a defined standard and layout for a project plan, and you may have to follow this. It doesn't matter a toss what it looks like. It doesn't matter that you don't yet know all the jobs that need to be done. Write down the jobs that you know have to be done to get the project started and leave the crystal ball-gazing until you feel yourself better informed.

You will never feel entirely happy about predictions when you are forced to make them. In some situations, for example in business or in the military, you may be forced to make predictions and know that in the first case, maybe your job is on the line, and in the second, lives are on the line. No doubt about it: a lot of projects are about serious things, and a lot of project leaders make decisions which do affect careers and/or lives.

One other thing about jobs: jobs must be explicit. Think through or write down the sequence of events that must happen for the job to be carried out. If you cannot do this, or if you fudge it, then the chances are you're not being explicit enough. Often this is because what you are treating as one job is in fact a series of jobs. What you should do is to break it down further. Remember that jobs can be: (a) serial in nature “ Job A must be done before Job B can start; (b) parallel in nature “ Jobs A and B can be done at the same time; (c) grouped “ Job A really consists of a number of jobs which all have to complete before Job A can be considered complete. (Watch these little guys “ they're the ones that will get you if you're not careful.)