Where Are We Going?

Vincent is a Senior Project Management Consultant and e-Learning Developer.

  Stakeholder Management   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

When managing a project, do unfolding events often overwhelm your plan, casting aside all the time and effort you spent carefully crafting it? Here is a framework for keeping your plan relevant, with your team focusing on today’s work and you staying one step ahead of the issues that can impact the "big picture" down the road.

As project manager you are responsible for the big picture. While project team members focus on implementing the details, you need to make sure those details can be integrated together to form a working deliverable. As they focus on today, you focus on tomorrow, next week and next month.

You start with your strategy to review how you plan to incrementally build up the end product. Each stage of the strategy identifies the pieces to be built and integrated together. You need a thorough understanding of the current stage along with an understanding of how it impacts subsequent stages. This is important because when you run into a problem in the current stage, you are forced to make decisions which will directly impact subsequent stages. A quick workaround to resolve a problem which arises during one stage may not be compatible with the subsequent stages. Then, in the future, it will be necessary to undo the workaround. Therefore, it is better to resolve the current issue with a solution that is compatible with future work.

As you manage the team…

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