pre-emptive project planning

I took part in last week’s STC web seminar on pre-emptive project planning by John Hedtke.

Found it practical and useful.

His main points:

Plan ahead
The real problem is the projects you don’t know about that land on your desk suddenly and without warning.

Keep it simple
Use a simple excel sheet to track your current and upcoming projects instead of project tracking software.
Project tracking software depends on clear, stated dependencies that do not change frequently.
Technical communications has multiple interconnected dependencies that can change daily, sometimes hourly.

Gather information about projects that officially don’t exist yet
Use informal and formal ways to find out what projects might become real.

Distribute your project plan to everybody except sales.

Communicate
Talk to everyone at all levels. Ask probing questions. Don’t believe the official pronouncements. Check them out with the folks in the trenches

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