The importance of planning ahead

In IT project management, having the right technical skills is only the start of getting the job done, and probably the most easily remedied if need be, either through training such as Cisco training, or just by hiring someone who has those skills.

More important is getting the design process done right. I once worked for an IT consultancy company, as part of a team doing a fairly complex project. The test analyst had interviewed the clients at length, and had compiled a detailed record of the current processes that we would be automating and how they worked.

However, once it came time to deliver the project, it turned out that the design spec was not complete after all. Sure, it was mostly correct, but some things had been left out.

Because development work had largely been completed, it was necessary to go back and retrofit the new requirements into the code. But retrofitting in this way is always much more time-consuming and costly than getting it right in the first place.

Donald Rumsfeld once made this quote:

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Paying special attention to the design process is the only way to avoid getting stung by unknown unknowns when running an IT project.