Micro-Planning

Micro-Planning

It is possible to overplan. Activities can be broken down into successively smaller units to the point where each hour of each team member's day is planned to a level of detail that will fall apart before the project is a day old. Planning is concerned with weeks and with activities that are decomposed to a "reasonable size."

However, most projects encounter critical periods when dayby-day control is required. For example:

Integration and testing, when a number of modules are completed at about the same time, may require tight control to ensure that modules are handed over to the integration team as they are needed.

Prototyping, which is characterized by brief flurries of development interspersed with user reviews, may require a daily level of control.

A series of short activities, such as detailed definitions of business functions, may need day-by-day monitoring.

These types of occasions require micro-planning, a process that focuses regular planning down to the daily and even hourly level. Micro-planning is no different from normal planning. You decompose activities, determine dependencies, and level resources. The difference is only in the scale and degree of formality.

Micro-planning is not a replacement for regular planning. You are zooming in on a small part of your project plan, transforming the scale of planning from months or weeks to days or hours. Microplanning, however valuable, belongs within the larger framework of an overall plan. Otherwise you have nothing on which to zoom in.

Keep micro-planning informal. Use hand-drawn schedules or make up a daily activity list on a word processor. These are rough, transient, temporary working papers that you will consign to the wastebasket once the crunch is over. Do not formalize a micro-plan. If you do, you risk, first, that your management will come to expect such detail; second, that you will become fully occupied in planning the minutiae of each team member's day; and third, that your team will crack because of the intense pressure that micro-planning creates.

The pressure arises from tracking. You track a micro-plan the same way you track a normal one. However, just as the scale of a micro-plan is one of days, so is the frequency of status reporting. Suddenly, team members who have become used to weekly status meetings are required to report their status at least daily, and sometimes  hourly. Such high-intensity bursts may be needed at critical points in the project, but they cannot be sustained over its normal life.

Micro-planning can be seductive in the sense of apparent control that it gives. It is especially appealing to project managers who thrive on crises, since it emulates the intense, immediate-term focus that crisis management requires. The problem is that any project that is managed as a crisis soon becomes one, with strategies, context, and long-term value sacrificed to the headiness of the moment.

To summarize, micro-plan informally and infrequently. Resist anyone who attempts to standardize or institutionalize micro-planning. Above all, before you micro-plan, make sure that this phase of the project work really requires it and that you have not succumbed to the temptation to replace leadership by authority.

What If?

Management or The Client Requests a Micro-Planning Level of control Over All Aspects of The Project.

This is a particular danger with organizations that love crises. The rollup-the-shirtsleeves, full-speed-ahead mentality does not thrive when things are going smoothly. But as described above, you cannot sustain that level of control over the life of a project without creating a high degree of stress and friction among team members.

Actions

Separate reporting from control. When you are asked to give a current status, speak in terms of hours or days, not weeks. But when you are dealing with your team, ensure that you provide them with an environment of calm within which they can work.

Resist all attempts to get you to prepare a plan that is detailed to any less than two weeks. However, if your client wants a daily update, provide a written, point-form outline of progress to date.