If you’ve read my discussion of using analytics in design project management, you might be asking how anyone can plan for a design project. After all, if I claim that design is a non-deterministic process, how could it possibly be planned for? Design would then be a pretty bad business risk, right? Short answer: yup.
The long answer is a little more hopeful, but we have to change the way we plan for design processes if we are to grapple with the uncertainty (and hence risk) that goes along with design. If you’ve ever studied personal productivity, or (gasp) ever procrastinated on a big project, you may have learned the cardinal rule of getting things done: do the big stuff first.
The same rule works well for design. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Use the time for planning as a way to discover what the big problems are, where the big value is, where the gaps in information or technology lie. When the project starts, make sure folks stay focused on this big stuff first. With the big stuff out of the way, you’ll be on track.
Where people get messed up is with big projects. With the stakes and cost high, Microsoft Project comes out and people start writing down whatever they can think of that needs to get accomplished during the design process. Then the inevitable happens, in the push to show progress (percent complete, usually) people look for items they can get done and check off the list. These end up being the small easy items. Sigh…
The result is that the big issues don’t get worked on until the end. By then, time has expired doing easy stuff that will usually have to be re-done once the big decisions finally get made. Big design projects typically die this way, a billion mosquitoes irritate the project to near-death, and then at the end, a giant tiger leaps out of the jungle and eats everyone alive.
A better path is to worry about the tigers up front and ignore the mosquitos. In fact, do yourself a favor, don’t even write those pesky little tasks down in a project plan. Save the planning just for the big problems, big value opportunities, big information gaps and big technological issues. Put the little items that come up on a list (I call it a backlog list) so you *will* forget about them and stay focused on the big stuff. Agile software development folks will see where I am going with this kind of talk. But I really just like to think of it as dodging the mosquitoes to get the big game at the end of the day.
I alluded to design being a risky business proposition at the beginning of this article. The truth is: betting ones bread and butter on a non-deterministic process has to be risky. Design is the creation of intellecutal property. It is grappling with the unknown. Design is big game hunting. When big game hunting, don’t grapple with mosquitos, just focus on the tiger, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be the big game hunter you planned on being as opposed to a snack for a big cat.
