Given the exponential increase in cloud computing, vendor utilization, budgetary juggling, and even reprioritzation of priorities, a lot’s working against you and your perfect plan. A well planned project, product, or process is one that plans to evolve. If you don’t build provisions in to your work for things to have to change, then you’re building something that will be difficult to work with.
This is not to say that the core purpose will evolve over time, but how you get there definitely may. Here are some strategies you can build in to your program or product design to ensure that you are flexible enough to stay relevant:
- The tactics of how you achieve your goal are less important than having the right goal. Acknowledge in your proposal or project plan a few realistic paths to achieve your end goal.
- Include in your project a Steering Committee that can guide the implementation or development team during design phase. The Steering Committee should consist of knowledge experts that know what mistakes to avoid given your company’s idiosyncracies.
- This is really hard to do, but don’t get pigeon-holed into such short development timelines that you are forced to cut out revision cycles and beta programs. Buffer your first few cuts of the dev or project timelines so you have more time to negotiate with. It’s only a matter of time before someone asks for things to be done faster.
- A lot of projects go into so-called maintenance period after initial rollout. Maintain within the scope of your current project to perform a one-year assessment that measures performance and scopes any “evolutionary” tweaks that need to be made as a result of other things that have happened in the past year.
Understanding that there are an infinite number of dependencies your specific project might have, set your company and yourself up for success by building in the fact that you’re probably going to have to change something somewhere along the way.
Annie Tsai 