The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - P.A.C.E. Planning for Your Project | FF23

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Hey everyone, welcome to Foundations Friday 23. Set the pace, P-A-C-E, for your project. And that has to do with contingency planning, and it's a methodology where you make sure you have your primary plan, which means the day is sunny, you have all the resources you need, you're on schedule, budget, all the good stuff that goes with a perfect project, which is very rare. Or a project that just, you know, goes along, and then you have an alternate, that's the A, so P-A. And that's, you know, maybe you're not at a perfect point, you're losing a little functionality, but you're still able to launch the whole thing. But it's not optimal, it's your alternate plan.

Then you have a contingency plan. Let's say you can only go with half of the features that you wanted to launch. And then your emergency plan, which means you have to not go live, you have to not launch. It's a quick way to set up contingency planning by thinking through scenarios. What can we keep doing? What can't we keep doing? Are we too far past this change or that change? It's also used, and this is the context I use it in, in a previous episode on way back and between the slides, episode 40,

for public safety and special events and incident management, that you have to have that contingency planning in place, particularly when lives could be at stake, right? When something goes bad, the car comes on the bike course or weather comes in suddenly and causes havoc or there's a fire somewhere or something like that. So this pace and setting the pace for your project is something that should be done for sure by everyone, by every project manager as part of a change management process even. It's really important. It's really easy to do. There's a lot of literature out there.

I have some templates and stuff that I can share as well. But as we go to this Friday on June 25th, let's set that pace for ourselves and our lives and for our projects in particular. So we know what we're going to do if we have everything we need. We know what we could do if we have not quite everything, if we have half of everything. And then if we just have to have a completely different plan and be flexible and dynamic, which happens in life. And I thank you all for being dynamic and flexible with the way the show's going. I'll put out some full episodes here in the near future. Got a heavy workload between life and work

and things like that, but I appreciate you all and your commitment here and sticking with it and sharing the show. And remember, there's a new feature on Apple Podcasts about how you can follow, so please do that. Check things out. There are archived episodes and posts on peopleprocessprogress.com,

at peopleprocessprogress on Instagram and Facebook. Thank you, everybody. Stay safe out there. Wash your hands and Godspeed.