Does your workday often feel like you are working in the Emergency Room? Every patient (aka project) brought your way comes at you with a sense of urgency. If you rush each patient in for a treatment without asking questions and further investigating what is needed, you could be wasting valuable time and money going in the wrong direction. Imagine simply throwing a sling on a car crash victim and offering stitches to someone who is having an allergic reaction to a bee sting.
Why the tangent about this imaginary day at the ER? To demonstrate to you that one must go through a process first before slapping on solutions. The same rings true for project planning.
Projects are often assigned with very little time to plan, or so it seems. Unrealistic deadlines can push employees to run screaming through the halls demanding charts. Before leaping right into things, take a look around at what information you must first gather so you can assess what needs to take place. Just one hour to plan ahead properly will save you time in the end while meeting your deadline. Best of all you’ll do it without hitting speed bumps and conflicts.
Outlining Deliverables and Acceptance Criteria
First, you must identify the high level deliverable for each main subset of the project. A deliverable is something concrete (defined by a noun) that you need in order to progress to the next stage of the project.
You must also deliver the acceptance criteria. The acceptance criteria are the measurable characteristics of what makes the final and interim deliverable acceptable. This is often defined by what the client is expecting. If you don’t know the answers then you need to ask more questions and learn more about the goal of your project.
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