Wrong, bad, go to the naughty step, hate that, hate hate hate.

My job is to deliver the project, successfully,  not win a p*ssing contest with the supplier/customer/partner PM.  I’ll not compromise my employers  position, but my first and foremost is to deliver a profitable project, with a happy customer and partners who want to work with us again.

It should be yours also.

In order to do so i used the metaphor of someone who, looking into the distance can see their immediate destination close up, they can see the fences that bar their way, or shortcuts that will  save time and effort and can plan their route in detail.

However as they look further into the distance and towards their eventual destination, the detail to which they can plan their route gets less and less.  Its only as they travel their route that they get to see the new barriers, new paths to tread and that they can plan the route for the the next phase in detail.

Have a view of the long term goals of your project but you cant plan the whole thing in detail as things change was you go, plan the next phase in detail using your experience to make informed decisions, defining the detailed requirements for the each phase in turn refining your understanding of the project deliverables as you go.

And remember, the methodology is a tool to achieve the end goal not the goal itself .

The jury is still out as to whether this is a good thing, PM’ing isn’t something hard to me, and i do get to expand into scrum, as opposed to Prince2 methodologies, I’m not convinced that Prince2 works, in fact, I kind of have a sneaking suspicion that a methodology that focuses on the documentation, where the methodology is one of the (if not the) deliverable, is seriously flawed.  Done right it can work for certain projects, done wrong, by the letter with too many ‘controls’  its all too easy for the methodology to get in the way.

Scrum may be interesting, so far its not been boring.