Pirmin's Podcast : IT - ERP - Projects 33 years of experience - 99 thoughts, a weekly podcast

# 15 If a plan will fail, why should I plan?
Good question. Like a famous quote in military lessons „No plan will survive the first contact with the enemy“ (attributed as quote to many historical military persons). This has been proven by many battle plans in history, but military does not stop making plans. Are they stupid? Wasting time with plans? No they are highly intelligent! (However you can generally question if any kind of military action is intelligent). By play-ing / making the plans you start thinking about alternatives and different ways. In case your plan fails, you have an alternative.  


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# 14  If plan “A” fails, the alphabet has 25 other letters
As mentioned in „A Plan is a Plan“, things can go wrong and will go wrong. (Remember Murphy’s laws) Most likely failure will happen the moment where it’s either completely unex-pected or most critical. A good thing to anticipate that, is to have a draft version of a backup / failure plan. This does not mean to have a detailed version of it, but having this in mind or drafted will help you to focus again if there is a major change in plan „A“.


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#13 A plan is a plan
When you handle complex projects, making a plan how to execute the different steps, identifying the critical path, defin-ing the resources and working on different scenarios is crucial-ly important. But life / your project will not follow your plan! The moment you signed off the plan, started to work on it, things will diverge from the plan. Now comes the situation everyone fears, the plan does not match the reality anymore and needs to be adjusted. The magic is about, how to keep a plan as long as possible aligned with the execution. You should have a good master plan with reasonable milestones but plan the execution not too long ahead. The longer ahead you make a detailed plan the more chances to changes/deviations from it you have.



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#12  Don’t do too much parallel 
During project execution we will face challenges that things don’t go like they were planned. We then tend to find ways to optimize the progress.. These include strategies like adding more resources, but be careful, typical elementary school math question: if one musician plays a song in 5 min, how long does it take if you add 4 more, not 1 min.. it still remains 5 min and if they want to play it proper they need some preparation time!  Beginning already with the next step, even though the step before is not fully finished is complex. Like multitasking, this seems to be on the first glance a good way, especially when you have more people or different teams working on different steps. But like multitasking the coordination of these activities make things more complex and the overhead in coordinating and controlling these tasks eat up much of the benefits and make things riskier. If you can avoid, then go step by step, finish each step on time and diligently.


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#11 What is said, is said
This goes with „People hear what they want to hear “, once a message is out, it's out! If you speak about budget and say any number, the moment you said it, this is the target budget, at least if it is less than the audience expected, even mentioning that it needs to be confirmed will not help in future discus-sions. The figures are in the head of the audience.
Same goes with a solution promise. If you confirm that this or that can be done, and the audience wanted to hear it, then you have to deliver, regardless how often you explain that you need to confirm / verify with the developer or so.


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#10 People hear what they want to hear
You can have PowerPoints or Excel-sheets as many as you want. You can hold meeting and explain facts and details. In many cases the audience goes the easy way and „hears what is comfortable “. If you are on a tight budget, the finance team most likely will pay attention on any comment and information about staying in budget/reduced costs, but not hear the risks associate with it. Be careful what you say! 


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#09This system even does not have an invoice layout
One of the comments I often had about IT systems is their ability to generate a desired output /print/file format. Most of the time it is either about finance, KPI reporting or any „need to look nice“ output like sales invoices or purchase orders.
This goes back to the „standard topic “, even though there is a general expectation about the outcome of a „item on stock list “:  something like item name, item number, quantity on stock , value,  should be on it.. Most companies have their additional requirement due to their structure.  So the general expectation is not wrong but also not sufficiently right.
If at one point in time someone from finance complains „this invoice looks crap and is not standard“, send them to their office, picking up 5 invoices from 5 vendors, and then they shall explain you what „standard invoice“ looks like! 



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#08This is standard
We all want to believe that there is a defined standard way of doing anything. In projects, you always hear, especially during the presales discussion, “this function is standard.” People want to be reassured by asking the question, “Can you confirm this is standard?” Now, take a step back and think what stand-ard truly means. If your business is standard and the solution is standard, what is it that will make the difference? 
Yes, not all special processes developed over the past in a company deserve to be transferred into the future, but ensure that you don’t end up cutting down the heart of your differentiation to your competitors. 


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#07 Local vs Global
Even though nowadays we always aim for global acting, be sure your business model requires it. If you depend on very local resources and markets, the target of a global acting sys-tem might be wrong. Or just simply adding complications where you don’t get a benefit.
Out of your business vision you should have seen where you want to act as business over the next decade. If you aim for a closed / local market, a closed/local system may be the better option. 

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# 06We have a very special business model
Well, yes and no. There are quite few general business models which describe the needs and structures of many organizations on a high to medium level. If you think you can’t fit in one of these, question yourself why! Being special and unique in op-erations and ways to define your processes can lead to very complex solutions. If you are sure that your business model is so unique, that it deserves a non-standard solution, then go for it, but be careful, a highly customized implementation typically means high and difficult to control costs and time.




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