One of Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” that has almost become a catch-cry for me is “Begin with the end in mind.” I’m amazed at how often I see project teams start out on a project with only a loose idea of what outcomes they are trying to achieve, and how they are going to achieve them.
The consequence is all to obvious – Project Managers run themselves in to the ground fighting fires with little or no opportunity to be proactive. Project Team members double up on work items and have no clear picture of how their activities relate to one another’s. Projects tend to run over budget, over time and often do not deliver what the client really needs.
The obvious solution is to “Begin with the end in mind.”
There is a well known illustration of what this means to start with the end in mind. It asks you to consider what the final stage might be of sending a team of astronauts to the moon. Consider how you would respond. Some people would answer that to be successful you need the lunar landing module to make a safe landing on the moon in such a way that the astronauts can exit to the surface. In reality, the final stage of the mission involves the astronauts standing safely on the deck of an aircraft carrier after they have been retrieved from the return vehicle within Earth’s ocean, or from the shuttle craft landing safely at one of the compatible air bases on Earth.
By planning every stream of activity within a phase of a project before we begin, we can adequately identify what deliverables we are going to produce, what the dependencies are, what risks are present and what opportunities might exist for delivery acceleration. Our task becomes one of proactively managing the outcome, looking to the “horizon” rather than a daily constant battle to dodge obstacles just in front of our feet.