When Planning Has to Be Quick

Optimizing project planning with time-saving strategies

Even when we have the time, using time-saving tricks can help us focus on tasks that have no real shortcuts or just need more attention. Planning can be repetitive from project to project, especially when working with the same teams on domain areas because the themes of the type of work, the people, and the resources available will be the same, and over time, knowing how well the people work together can help with estimations. When moving fast, removing repetitive work is the highest-value place to focus our energy. Here are the areas with highly repeatable effort that we can reduce the time spent on:

• Repeatable high-level estimates

• Management checklists

• Project plan templates

• Buffering

Let’s explore each of these.

Repeatable high-level estimates

In many environments, there are repeatable tasks that continually come up across projects. These often relate to configurations and data modeling. Keep a list of these tasks, their descriptions, and the typical effort estimate. It's good practice to use a range for the estimate to give some room for quick tweaking. If you feel a specific instance of a task is more complicated, just use the upper range; if it is standard or simpler, use the lower range.

When building out a project plan, consult this list to easily knock out the repeatable items and move on to where the ...