There is a balance where not enough detail harms the progress of the project and too much, delays different deliverables. Incorporating some measure of ‘ready to start’ (and periodically reviewing this for e.g. agile stories) is a good way to verify if you have done enough planning and elaboration. That way you can adjust appropriately for your own, your team’s needs. Project managers generally talk a lot more about planning horizons, they cut their teeth on projects where there was a direct link between certainty and forecast accuracy, and the client understood that. Certainty would relate to having a clear brief, commitment of staffing and the required budgets being secured – and no competing priorities for the project. Without that certainty, a plan is a work of fiction. Priorities do compete and change. What is a sufficient amount of planning? This is the perennial question. Determining what level of decomposition to have in a WBS, or the granularity of tasks required to complete a deliverable, always seem to pose issues for those involved in planning.
Yes the detailed planning is harmful when a customer doesn’t know what he need and a supplier is not able to prepare attractive but suitable offer. Also, when people want to make a very detail plans for a very long time. If they do, their main activity is changing everything instead of delivering project products.
Most of us agree with the almost impossibility of forecasting an estimate of something that will indeed equal the actual. Humans are not good estimators, we have trouble estimating with accuracy what time we will arrive home after work, or how long it will take to travel from one side of town to the other. Of course, this introduces the concept of risk, and its importance in tying all the various planning components together. Setting realistic expectations with stakeholders is fundamentally important, but can only really be effectively achieved once the planning process has been completed, or certainly a long way towards completion, taking into account all the relevant areas. It is all in the balancing to achieve the desired project results while gauging and adjusting to the performance of the project along the way. Detailed Planning can be problem, if it has not communicated yet with the customer. If you have good communication within your detailed project planning, you could alert the appropriate stakeholder. Many changes are for the good, but to my mind the effectiveness of project delivery has suffered because project management is now horribly over-engineered.
The level of depth in details needed for a project would directly be proportional to the overall duration and sensitivity of the project to the stakeholders and the clients. The project manager always needs to draw the line based on these factors. The riskier the project, the more details are needed at planning.
The detailed planning does not kill a project, people do. The planning is normally done by business people with business expectations and the negotiation skill of the project needs to highlight issues with more realistic outcomes. Should the manager be the planner, he need to relook their demands and be more realistic. So it’s about details that people create which could kill any project.
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