Have you ever wondered why so many new roads get dug up within a few months for new pipes or cables to be laid? Then the nice new road becomes a patchwork quilt, covered with a lump of tarmac punctuated by pot-holes. Why can’t they just get their planning right and do all that work at the same time – surely it would save them money?
Of course you are right – and you are describing one of the biggest challenges for Project Managers worldwide – how can we get a full set of requirements and then build a coordinated plan to deliver those requirements in an efficient manner. In the real world we find that people “forget” requirements or discover requirements later on, so we have to do the equivalent of digging up the road and re-doing some of the work that has already been done.
At Aspira, we have developed an approach called Project Kick-Start, where in two weeks we complete a detailed initial analysis of a project, identifying all the assumptions, dependencies, risks and constraints that apply to the project. It’s our way of avoiding project pit-falls and pot-holes.