Setting expectations

As I’ve mentioned, my gig until the end of June is to produce a business plan for a new-ish service for my company. Toward that end, I’ve put together a project plan, breaking down all the goals and deliverables in a multi-page schedule. It’s a straightforward plan—a matrix of deliverables, due dates, components, information sources, dependencies, comments, approving authority and completion dates. I’ve also got a fistful of assumptions, resources and constraints, because I want to be clear that I’m not pulling any of this stuff out of the ether, and that Stuff Happens. I’m just laying out what some of that Stuff might be.

It's called managing expectations.

It’s not the most sophisticated thing—it’s in Word, not even Excel, much less Project. But it’s easier for me to work with it in this application, and since I’m the sole actor in this project, I don’t see why I should have to wrestle with Excel, or try to get IT to buy Project (and then try to learn how to use it). After all—I’ve only got until June to deliver a business plan.

One of the milestones was to have said project plan reviewed and approved by today, so I sent out a draft version (with DRAFT watermarked on each of the 12 pages) on Friday. My former manager had already given me his input, so the only thing I needed was feedback from my new manager, which she returned over the weekend.

With two exceptions, all her comments were regarding the content of milestones/deliverables—i.e., she was not responding to the elements of the project plan, but to what I speculated will be elements of the business plan. (The business plan is the end result of the activities outlined in the project plan, which is how I propose to produce that end result.)

I puzzled over those comments for a while on Monday. Then I wandered into my former manager’s office and asked, “Is the concept of a project plan new to this organization?” He replied, “Yes. Yours is the first one anyone here has ever seen.”

Huh.

Well, I don’t know whether to be amused or dismayed by this. On the one hand, no one’s going to be peering over my shoulder and tsk-tsking me about my lack of project management finesse. On the other…oh, dear.

Well, nevermind. I got the plan approved on Monday, and I’m working toward my next milestone. Plus, you know, networking for my next gig.