L
et us begin with a heresy so obvious it will strike some as revelation: your beloved MS Project file is not a project plan. Neither is any other Gantt-bedizened liturgy of bars and dates. It is not the droning procession of activities, milestones, and dependencies that will save you from your own wishful thinking.
Time and again, when one asks the perfectly straightforward question—May I see your project plan?—what arrives, with the air of a conjurer unveiling Excalibur, is an .mpp file. If we had a coin for each time this happened, we would not be millionaires; we would merely dine better, which in our experience is a far more reliable measure of human progress.
Yes, an MS Project schedule can be impressive in its way. A hinge-point here, a dependency there, resources assigned with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. Some go so far as to break down phases into sub-phases, activities into sub-activities, until the thing resembles a never-ending pattern of managerial anxiety. It is, at its best, a delicate piece of filigree. And, like filigree, largely ornamental—particularly to the majority who cannot even open it, condemned as they are to squint at a pixelated screenshot in a slide deck and pretend comprehension.
But no matter how grand the fresco or how fine the brushwork, it remains what it is: a schedule. It is still not a plan. Repeat after me, with staccato emphasis for those in the back: it. is. not. a. plan.
If we were to plan a bank robbery—and I do not recommend it, though the metaphor is serviceable—we might indeed decide who digs the tunnel, who cuts the alarm, which drill bites best through the safe, and how much time we have before the getaway car must depart. This is choreography. It may even be good choreography. But it is not strategy. It is not governance. It is not control.
The Project Management Body of Knowledge, not a volume to inflame the senses but occasionally sound on first principles, defines a project plan as “a formal, approved document used to guide both project execution and project control.” Please linger a moment on those last two words. A plan is not merely a roster of tasks and a calendar with delusions. The activities will change; the dates will slip; the people you are relying on will, being human, err. The plan is the system by which you intend to remain in charge of reality when reality declines to obey your spreadsheet.
Where is your governance model? How will you manage risk when it ceases to be hypothetical? What is your change control when change becomes the only constant? Where are the issue pathways, the escalation ladders, the communications regime that tells the right truth to the right people at the right time? Who decides, and what do they decide, and by what criteria, when the elegant latticework of your schedule meets the indifferent brutality of events?
Return, if you like, to our bank job. What do we do when the headcount is higher than expected? Do we triage the vulnerable or let the old teller die because he is inconvenient to the plan? Who assumes command when the appointed lead goes down under the flab-to-firearm zeal of an overeager security guard? What is the line we shall speak to the authorities when captured, and who is authorized to speak it? If you cannot answer these questions, you are not planning. You are daydreaming.
This, incidentally, is why the beloved television series—La Casa de Papel for the binge-watching classes—captured imaginations. The Professor is not impressive because he can read a floorplan. He is impressive because he imagines failure states, inventorying the unknowns with morbid tenderness, and installs mechanisms of response: contingencies, countermeasures, doctrine. In other words, he has a plan. He has anticipated the moment when the plan fails—and planned for that too.
A real project plan is the architecture of foresight. It lays out who decides and how, what risks justify preemption and which tolerate delay, what changes are admissible and what triggers a reset, who needs to know what and when. It is the constitution of the enterprise, not the parade schedule.
By all means, keep your schedules. They are useful, as timetables are useful. But do not confuse the railway clock with the locomotive, let alone the track. If you wish to be something more than the victim of your own chart, build the apparatus of control: governance, risk, change, issue, and communication management. Then, and only then, may your glittering grid of dates aspire to be part of a plan rather than a calendar with pretensions.
