Planning for the unknown is difficult in any situation. Planning for unknown factors in PLM projects can be hard to justify in project review sessions and removing activities associated with undefined criteria can seem like an easy way to cut project costs, but are you being penny wise at the risk of pound foolish?

Here is the scenario: Imagine it is a Friday afternoon and you, the engineering manager are getting a call from your IT team and its bad news. On this particular Friday, you have, at the behest of a project manager instituted a freeze of your product data vault, the place where the mechanical and electrical engineering teams save and store their work. This production system freeze has been on the calendar for weeks, team members have booked vacation time as to not be in the office during this disruptive freeze. In fact, just last week a product review deadline was pushed out by three days to allow for the upgrade team to deploy the new changes in your production environment. The product review push is only three days, but no one can turn back the clock now and the ramifications of this push back will ripple throughout the organization for weeks to come. As with any delay to market there will be ongoing conversations (a euphemism for finger pointing and blame assignment.) And now, on the Friday afternoon before the production deployment the decision is made that a work around needs to be developed because an older version of one program will not communicate with a newest version of another, a service request was filed last week with one software company and then another and the recommended work around options are not working in the Test environment; the team decides to not roll out to production this weekend.

The day is wasted.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld “The message is that there are no "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”

A title of Project Manager means different things to different companies, different industries and different projects. Professional Project Managers go through years of ongoing training and may run thousands of projects during their career. When things run smoothly, they run smoothly and a good project manager may go largely unnoticed, as with any person doing their job well, the lack of issues leads to the impression that they may not even be necessary. When things go wrong however, a project manager is often the first to be thrown under a bus or be asked to fall on the sword. Understanding the ramifications of delays in one area on another is a project managers job, knowing that a delay here or there will push out this date or that meeting, travel might have to be rescheduled, deliveries may arrive early and sit or if a schedule is to protracted resources may sit idle. Worse still, is the possibility of not fully understanding the ramifications of a delay in one area over another.

Some sayings are worth their weight in gold, “Plan the work and work the plan!” A truly well run project starts long before the project kickoff event, long before any purchase orders are issued. The best run projects start with excellent Scopes of Work that have had multiple collaborators and review cycles, they are discussed and revised and discussed again. Stakeholders in the project’s success are in on planning meetings, dates are laid out, and contingency activities “Known Unknowns” should be counted on and budgeted for.

Too often individuals responsible for funding approval and budget review feel it necessary to cut project costs by asking for cut corners or reduced scope but are they really serving the companies best interests by shaving a few dollars off of a project plan?

A good project plan is laid out for success by the experts you consulted with and by defunding activities you invite larger problems down the road. A sure recipe for failure is to exercise a full team of subject matter professionals to devise a plan and in the end issue an order for something different or something else entirely based on a mitigating business factor.

In summation, I encourage you to stick with the Rumsfeld methodology, “Do the best you can to pull information and teams together and trust what the professionals tell you.”