Do You Speak Planning?

“With languages, you are at home anywhere.” – Edmund de Waal 

In 1770, Captain James Cook and his crew ran aground on the Australian coasts and found the Aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that were jumping around and putting their babies in their pocket and asked what it was. The Aboriginal answered “Kangaroo”. It was only years later that they learnt that “kangaroo” meant “I don’t understand”. 

This famous anecdote, although inaccurate from a strictly historical point of view, proves the need to have a common system of linguistic signs, voice, graphics or gestures, in other words a “language”, to communicate between individuals and avoid misunderstanding. 

A misunderstanding is common in our daily life. While this can be funny in the private sphere, it is often harmful in a professional environment, leading to a waste of time, energy or even money, generally avoidable. 

At setec eocen, during our consulting missions in Project Management, we frequently encounter this kind of situation. Our consultants usually start their mission by familiarizing themselves with the project and assessing the implemented methods and tools, we regularly notice the need to come back to the definition of the words and their use. No, a “planning” is not a series of dated actions nor a cloud of points in a so called “planning” software, an “interdependence” is not just simple a link, and a planning is not “robust” only for it is extremely detailed… Finally, it is a bit like if we are not speaking the same language, so let’s have fun in this article by dealing with this issue as such.  

The vocabulary 

The French language has around 100 000 words and the English language has more than twice as much. What about the planning lexicon ? Deadline, constraints, predecessor, successor, gap, delay, interdependence, total and free floats…the project management vocabulary is technical and, if you want to communicate well, it is fundamental that all the used terms are known and understood by all the stakeholders. 

Thus, in our globalized world where English is the main language of exchange, we advise you to be particularly careful with false friends. One of the most common ones that we often encounter in our consulting missions in France is the word “délai” (in French), generally translated in our work meetings by “delay”. Beware, this is only true when it is meant to express some lateness but, in French, “délai” is also used to express a specific date or duration until a due date. For example, “Quel est le délai pour l’envoi du compte rendu ?” should then be understood as “What is the deadline for sending the report?”. 

Another example we frequently encounter in our missions is the confusion between “task”, “action”, or “activity”. A task or an activity has a significantly longer duration than the finest granularity of your schedule and will mobilize one or more resources and result in a deliverable, while an action does not involve duration and is generally assigned to a single person. Having a good schedule does not exclude the necessity of having a good action register, and vice versa!   

We are not going to review all the lexical field, but we really wish to make you aware of the confusions that the use of even the simplest words can create. Therefore, we advise you to verify both what you understand and what you wish to communicate. This is why our consultants consistently show curiosity towards their clients and employ methods such as active listening and reformulation to avoid any pitfalls in this regard. 

The grammar 

Grammar provides the core rules and the structure of the language just like processes and methodologies define the way a project will be planned and executed. Task sequencing, temporal planning and resource allocation are all planning construction that need to be implemented following specific rules to get coherent and reliable information on projects. 

Thus, the fact that any planning task (except for project start and end milestones) must have a successor and a predecessor can be considered as a “grammatical” rule of planning building. To run with this metaphor, just as a sentence is only intelligible if it consists of a subject, a verb and correctly juxtaposed complements, a schedule only makes sense if it consists of properly linked tasks and milestones allowing the identification of the critical path(s), i.e. the sequence of tasks without margin that defines the project’s duration. 

At setec eocen, we support our customers in the creation of meaningful schedules. Project using milestone-based methods, for example, may too often be illustrated by “scatter plot” plans, i.e. a sum of milestones planned over time with date constraints instead of links and durations. If you are in this situation, make sure to identify the tasks and activities that will provide the deliverables to validate the milestones rather than the milestones themselves. This will give more meaning to your planning reviews and performance indicators then linked to a work and not only to a milestone achievement. 

Conversely, as we sometimes observe in our consulting missions, if you are more focused on resource management and the resulting expenses, you may have many tasks and not enough milestones to track deliverables. We often see some of our customers having difficulties managing the dichotomy between a work and the validation of the deliverable or the resulting milestone: “Should I extend the task until the deliverable is validated?”, “Should I stop it earlier and constrain my next task to start later?” are some common questions which we advise you to answer by illustrating the reality of your project in your plannings. We recommend creating tasks over the duration during which they mobilize resources and linking them (possibly “offsetting”) to deliverables and milestones, themselves predecessors of the subsequent project phases and the “story” your plan is supposed to tell. 

Finally, just as sentences should not be too long to avoid losing the thread and remain understandable, a planning construction rule concerns the duration of tasks. They should be neither too long nor too short. It is difficult here to make quantified recommendations, as such a rule depends on the nature and complexity of the project, but to provide a guideline, you can base it on the governance within your project and the planning granularity that will likely result. If you want to review the plan weekly to ensure there are things to discuss, advancements, completions, do not schedule activities longer than four weeks, split them. If you only plan to conduct monthly reviews, avoid activities longer than three months. A lot happens in three months, and to maintain your ability to anticipate delays or overspending, we advise splitting your tasks or scheduling intermediate deliverables and milestones. 

The conjugation 

As a third linguistic pillar, conjugation determines how verbs change depending on the person used and the temporal sense we wish to give our sentences, just as a plan can express things in the past, present, and future and find different utilities depending on whether you are a project team member, project manager, or portfolio manager.  

We usually start with future to conjugate a schedule. If its arguments are correctly recorded and interpreted, and if they respect the rules discussed earlier, it then allows us establishing the duration of the project by highlighting the critical path(s). Thus, a project team can anticipate works and resources needs, and then the project lead can assess the project cost and optimize its workload. 

This is the most common use of scheduling. “What are we going to do?”, “When?”, “With which resources?” are the questions we encounter most frequently during our consulting missions, and this is expected. However, we sometimes notice that the planning exercise is not realised with the same level of energy over the whole project duration. Nevertheless, it is essential to have a planning, if not detailed on the long term, at least robust, i.e. linked and realistic in relation to correctly formalized assumptions, to properly establish the project’s duration and cost at completion. 

A schedule is also particularly useful when conjugated in the present. It is indeed essential to know the progress status and the project activity planning to make the right decisions and to achieve relevant arbitrations, which is the main purpose of a good project management practice. To do so, the schedule needs to be updated as regularly as possible. 

The present is thus the most useful time in the planning. Indeed, the future depends on it since it is relying on the “Remains to be done” that can only be correctly assessed with an up-to-date schedule. It is also thanks to it that we correctly track and record what was achieved, generating relevant feedback and performance indicators.  

Too often overlooked, the conjugation of a plan in the past involves taking the time to analyze the actual work and deduce the relevant management actions for the project’s continuation or any future project. In this sense, it is important that a plan reflects the reality of events as they occurred, with the actual duration and cost. In our project management consulting missions, we often witness the lack of energy spent updating finished activities or milestones. Ensure, for example, to properly record the actual completion date of an activity or milestone rather than just updating the status, to know the actual duration of your tasks, which will improve the accuracy of your indicators. Also, record the reasons and impact of any task or milestone changes to enhance the robustness of your reports and the relevance of your decisions and arbitrations.  

Conclusion 

Despite not being able to offer a dictation exam, we sincerely hope to have heightened your awareness of the pitfalls or opportunities that “speaking planning correctly” can help you avoid or, conversely, facilitate. Active listening, reformulating, linked tasks that make sense for more useful schedules from the beginning to the end of the project for all stakeholders are ideas that will undoubtedly increase the added value of your planning activities. Therefore, if someone were to ask you “Do you speak planning?”, let’s bet you won’t answer “kangaroo”!