Project Basics - 5 Things

Greg Alleman at Herding Cats often discusses the complexities of complex Projects. Occasionally, he comes back to some very basic concepts that everyone doing Project work should understand.

Recently here, he outlines 5 Basics:

Where are we going?

How do we get there?

Do we have enough time, resources, and money?

What could get in our way?

How do we know our progress?

What other basic question would you ask to define the simplest view for your Project?   

E+R=O

It's a formula used by some Personal Development people:

E+R=O  which says Experience + Response = Outcome

It's used to indicate that individual outcomes in life depend on our response to what happens - not on what happens.

 

You can also apply a form of this to Project work. In spite of our planning, and even our wishing and hoping, things happen during our projects that are not as planned and are not our desired results. So what do we do?

We can fret and worry. We can cry and moan. We can curse the plan or the event or whatever it is that we want to blame. The problem is that none of these will solve anything. None of these will help our project.

Instead, we have to refocus and decide how to best respond to whatever goes off track.