Why Traditional Project Planning Often Fails


Home  >  Articles  > 
Why Traditional Project Planning Often Fails

Doug DeCarlo, Principal, The Doug DeCarlo Group

September 4, 2007







A colleague of mine, Ravi Mohan, founder of ProjectScape once quipped, “Your project plan is obsolete even before you hit the print button.” Ravi was referring to traditional project planning as applied to software development projects.
 
I accepted his pronouncement as intuitively obvious and never gave it much more thought until the other day when I happened to be leafing through Mike Cohn’s excellent book, entitled Agile Estimating and Planning. (1)
 
Here’s a summary of Mike’s four reasons why traditional approaches to planning often fail:
 
1. Planning is by activity rather than by feature
In traditional approaches, work breakdown structures are based on activities.



Please login/register to read the entire article.





sponsored announcements and special offers
Difficult for competitors to equal. EMA reviews IBM Rational's new quality & requirements management offerings. The verdict, "For companies seeking to improve ROI delivered by software projects,we believe Rational's value proposition is difficult to match."

Microsoft Project Conference 2000
Exclusively disclosing the powerful capabilities included in Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solutions while providing real world guidance on how Microsoft Project 2007 and Microsoft EPM Solutions are helping customers today with project and portfolio management to save money, enhance efficiency and prepare for future growth. Register Today!

Use WorkLenz PPM to Manage Agile Software Development
We invite you to download Métier’s latest white paper, Agile Software Development with WorkLenz, to learn how you can use WorkLenz to manage agile within your organization.



"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Winston Churchill