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Projects - Why are they so hard?

Project Planning and executing.  Why is it so difficult? 

To answer this question I went back to my Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute and looked at the process group interaction diagram.  Wow!  If anyone looked at this they would immediately get discouraged.  
Have we made it unnecessarily complicated?  

This week I have been re-reading the updated edition of David Allen's "Getting Things Done".  It is a fantastic book and I would commend it to anyone.  

David Allen’s natural planning model is fairly simple.  It contains 5 steps.  
  1. Define purpose and principles 
  2. Outcome visioning
  3. Brainstorming 
  4. Organizing
  5. Identifying next actions
As I reviewed it again, I started thinking about my own project model.  It took me a few minutes to think through it and capture the essence of it, but here it is, along with a bit of explanation about each step.  

My Simplified Project Model (Answer the questions and then get to work.) 

  1. Why are we doing this? 
    • Is this project congruent/aligned with our team/family/individual purpose/mission? 
    • If we do this project will it get us closer to that purpose/support our mission?
  2. What does the outcome look like? 
    • Identify the measures of success
    • Clearly define what it looks like and what "done" means
  3. How will we get there? 
    • Develop major steps
    • What does the "doing" look like?"
  4. What are the next actions?  
    • Don't spend a lot of time defining all of the actions. At this point, major buckets of work that have not been broken down into specific tasks are good enough. 
    • Get a few of the next actions defined and then move on to the next step.  
  5. Act.  
    • The hardest part of this process is moving out of the planning and into the doing.  Take a step into the darkness of the ambiguity of ill-defined problems and start working. 
    • Set yourself up a regular iterative cycle of 
      • Identifying next actions
      • Planning and assigning the next actions 
      • Executing the work
      • Regularly reviewing/evaluating progress   

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