Web-Telephone Seminar Recap:
Pre-emptive Project Planning

by Heather Celik, Quill Contributor

"My spleen is going to eat itself." Such a vivid image may not come to your mind when a critical assignment unexpectedly lands on your desk but that's how John Hedtke described it during a recent Web-telephone seminar on pre-emptive project planning.

If you're a manager who needs to track the workloads of other writers or even just someone who wants to manage their own assignments, you can use Hedtke's suggestions to:

• help avoid surprise projects,
• align upcoming tasks to particular areas of interest,
• raise the visibility of unofficial projects, and
• provide proof if you need to ask for more resources.

So before you receive an assignment that comes as a surprise and with a tight deadline, you can start asking about projects that have yet to be scheduled or approved. Then, using any information you can gather, you can create a simple spreadsheet to track and plan for these upcoming projects.

How It Works

1. Set up a spreadsheet with columns for the project lead, writer, project name, and a year's worth of weekly columns.
2. Add a row at the bottom that displays the total estimated hours per week.
3. Create two sections: one at the top for official projects and the other at the bottom for unapproved ("rumoured") projects.
4. Fill in all of the information for the official projects as well as any information you already know about the unapproved projects. This arrangement enables you to easily scan for the start and finish dates of all the projects.
5. Distribute the spreadsheet weekly to everyone on your team or in your department. Distributing the spreadsheet, in an organized way, helps raise the credibility and visibility of your team.
6. Maintain the spreadsheet by talking to everyone from managers to the "folks in the trenches." Ask probing questions and always verify official announcements.
7. Encourage everyone to be a spy. The key to pre-emptive planning is for everyone on the team to seek out as much detail about upcoming projects as they can. Such projects might include the next version of a product, a project pending budget approval, projects that will need customization, and projects where the potential lead has yet to be determined.

The difficulties of project planning usually don't involve the existing projects but the projects that you don't know anything about. You cannot foresee all of the projects that sneak up on you. And yes, sometimes "the dragon wins." But you just may be able to reduce the heat of the fire.

About Heather Celik

Last year, after teaching English in Istanbul for two years, Heather returned to the field of technical writing. She is now part of a group developing internal information for a network operations centre.