Project Management

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What business detail do you now insist on understanding before finalizing a plan?

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Aaron Porter
Community Champion
IT Director| Blade HQ Payson, UT, United States

Many of us have been given projects with incomplete scope, unidentified stakeholders, and hard deadlines that we were expected to start executing right away. If you've been through this, what have you learned from this experience? What do you ask about, today, that you didn't earlier in your career? How has this affected your outcomes (project success, career growth, etc.)?
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Aaron -

A key lesson I learned early on was to ask: "Who owns the benefits realization activities for this project once it is done and who owns the deliverables themselves?". Having managed a project which lived long beyond the delivery of its scope because no one was ready to take on the deliverables taught me that lesson the hard way!

Kiron
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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Today, the business detail I insist on understanding before finalizing any plan is simple but structural: what business decision this project exists to support.

Early in my career, I accepted starting work with incomplete scope, unclear stakeholders, and “non-negotiable” deadlines, assuming that better planning would compensate for the lack of clarity.
Experience taught me otherwise. Without a clear understanding of the underlying strategic decision, a project risks becoming the efficient execution of something that may not matter.

What I now ask upfront is:
  • What business decision will be made based on this project?
  • Who loses if the project fails and who benefits if it succeeds?
  • What problem will no longer exist when the project is finished?
  • What is explicitly out of scope, even if it seems important?
This shift has had a direct impact on outcomes.
Less rework, fewer late-stage conflicts, and faster, more grounded decisions when trade-offs arise.
It has also affected my career.
I am seen less as someone who delivers plans and more as someone who helps the organization make better decisions.

Planning remains essential. But without an explicit understanding of the business rationale, planning is merely the organization of effort, not the creation of value.
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Lissette Indhira Pimentel Sosa
Community Champion
Program Manager| HARPER SRL Santo Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Today, I insist on understanding what decision this project is meant to enable.
Early in my career, I focused on scope and deadlines. Now I ask: what business problem disappears if this succeeds, who owns the benefits, and what is explicitly out of scope? If that’s unclear, the plan will be fragile no matter how detailed it is.
That shift has reduced rework and changed how I’m perceived, less as someone who builds schedules, more as someone who protects value.

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