Episode 264: How to Plan Your Project Using Index Cards

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When it comes to identifying a reason for why so many projects fail then Bryan Barrow (http://nova-consulting.co.uk - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/bryanbarrow) has a simple answer for you. He says that a root cause of poor project delivery is poor planning. But he also says that this is not a failure of project management, but instead this is a failure of project leadership.

So if poor planning is the culprit then there has to be a better way to plan our projects. Right? Right!.

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In this interview we present Bryan Barrow (http://nova-consulting.co.uk - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/bryanbarrow) , who is an advocate of planning your project with index cards. So in our interview we are going to first discuss what the problem is with planning your project using sticky notes, and then we’ll look at the benefits of index card planning for your project, in particular on improved leadership, greater financial control, improved project governance and improved cross-department team-working and collaboration.

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The following are the first few pages of the transcript.

Hello Bryan! Welcome to The Project Management Podcast™!

Hi Cornelius. Thanks for having me.

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Cornelius Fichtner: You're very welcome. Thank you for joining us today here. We want to talk about how to plan your project using index cards. But before we go to the index cards, I think one of the main reasons why you came up with this approach is because the usual paper-based or post-it-based approach that people have for doing a planning workshop doesn’t really work all that well, does it? Bryan Barrow: No and it's not really to knock the use of post-it notes or sticky notes in planning because it is a very good approach mainly because it's collaborative. You're getting people in a room asking people for their ideas and contributions and trying to plan the project together. So far, so good but there are still some drawbacks.

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Bryan Barrow: One of those being that quite often you rely on subject matter experts and the knowledge in their heads. Another one is a low-level of knowledge transfer. So you can get people in a room, get them to throw out their ideas but it doesn’t necessarily reference back to the company's project management or software development methodologies. So you can come up with projects which would seem well planned but perhaps do not convey the right message that reinforce the way that a project should be working. And then you've got things like problems with facilities and with layout of logistics. Everything from what do you do with all the brown paper and the sticky notes you got all over the walls? So what do you when the sticky note start falling off? So what do you when you want to transfer all the information off the walls and into other tangible work products or artifacts? So those are the key problems.

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Cornelius Fichtner: Alright! Let's do a quick process check here what we mean about the brown paper and post-it planning workshop. Take me through such a workshop briefly so we understand what we're talking about here. Bryan Barrow: Okay. So a number of people I have worked with before have tried to plan projects with sticky notes so they'll get their project charter or their project mandate, they work out who they need to invite to that workshop. They'll bring them all together, explain the purpose and start getting them planning. And typically, it will become a let's do a bit of a brain dump. All of the things that we think we need to do and we'll put them all over the walls. We'll then start talking about them, what order should they be and how do we group them together and at that stage, you start to find that people have to stop and check so they have first of all have to stop and check what everybody else has written so that can take some time then they have to reflect to what they see and start adding more notes…

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To listen to this Interview you may download the audio at: Episode 264: http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/8/5/8/858969d80d32eec8/PM_Podcast_264_2014_02_28_bryan_barrow.mp3?c_id=6728106&expiration=1408544067&hwt=d6d97efead903af3793b498b7848ff10 Subscribe to The PM Podcast in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/project-management-podcast/id79900698#

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