I am working with a client right now trying to plan and model a large, complex custom development project that will affect their entire enterprise when it goes live.  No pressure!!

 

It occurred to me that, among the many challenges a project like that presents, is whether to start at the beginning and work forward to arrive at a planned end date, or start and the end, with a desired launch date, and work backward.

 

We have met in the middle.

 

We had two planning teams work almost independently - one that was focused on design, development and testing,to arrive at a projected date when the system might be ready for User Acceptance Testing or a Pilot, and another team that took into account the business’ needs and timing around launch, working backwards through deployment timeframes, training, documentation, pilots and user acceptance testing to see when we need the application to be ready.

 

This might sound a little crazy to you, or perhaps you do this routinely as a slightly different take on what we used to call a “forward pass” and “backward pass” through a network back in the good old project management days.

 

Either way, it’s just some food for thought as an exercise to see how far apart the business and technologists are, and how realistic your plan is…