The SharedPlan Approach To Planning

The SharedPlan tools are dedicated to an approach to planning that will reliably improve project success. That approach is to support you in creating and maintaining a sufficiently detailed plan and then broadly communicating that plan.

What do we mean by sufficiently detailed? Well, how many plans have you seen produced that dive into the deepest level of detail, a level of detail that is impossible to maintain throughout the life of the project, a level of detail that hides the real issues in the project. A sufficiently detailed plan has enough information so that the people participating in the project know who needs to be doing what and when as well as project dependencies between the tasks.

What do we mean by broadly communicating the plan? A bad plan that is broadly communicated is better than a great plan that is not circulated to the project team. The reason being that a bad plan that is broadly communicated will probably get fixed since no one on the project team wants to invest their time, energy, and capital in a plan that is doomed from the start. And, quite often, the people participating in a project may have insights that the person developing the plan lacks.

So, keep the plan as simple as possible, and communicate it to the people involved (participants and sponsors) as soon and as often as possible. You might be surprised how adhering to these two steps will improve the probability of project success.