The boss calls you into her office, gathers up a pile of papers, hands them to you and says, ‘Congratulations, this is your next project. Sales have promised it’ll be delivered to the customer by September 30, the scope is set in the contract, it’s a fixed price contract so that means the budget is fixed and – by the way – you can’t hire any more people’.

It’s the start of a million projects.

What happens next? You say, ‘Sure’, take the stuff and go. You start sending emails, allocating or hiring people, holding meetings, brainstorming, making phone calls . . .

Whoa there pardner!

Imagine you took your car to the garage and you said to the guy in the garage, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with my car but I need you to fix it in the next hour and I’ll pay you fifty pounds’, and he said ‘Sure’.

Imagine you weren’t feeling very well, you went to the doctor and you said, ‘Doc, I’m not feeling very well. Fix me now and I’ll give your forty euros for the visit’, and he said ‘Sure’.

Imagine you said to a builder, ‘I’d like you to build me a house and the budget’s $200,000’, and he said ‘Sure’.

Nobody (in their right mind) says ‘Sure’. Yet in many industries (especially knowledge and high-tech industries), people routinely say it. It’s mad!

If you’re in the business of being handed projects to execute (and let’s face it, who isn’t?), then there’s something you’ve got to understand. When they give you the project and say things like, ‘This is the delivery date’ or ‘The budget’s already been fixed’ or ‘You’ve got to do it with your existing team’ or similar, you have to understand that this is nothing more than a letter to Santa Claus.

A what?

A letter to Santa Claus. Let me explain.

We’ve all – when we were kids (or maybe even more recently) – written letters to Santa where we’ve said, ‘Dear Santa, this is the stuff I’d really like for Christmas . . .’. And then I’m sure we’ve all had the experience – even if we had very rich parents – of coming down on Christmas morning to find that we got some of the stuff we asked for but we probably didn’t get all of it.

Because the world isn’t like that – where we can just say, ‘Here’s what I want’ and we get it.

The world of business is no different. There may be perfectly valid business reasons why they’re asking for these things. (There generally are. It’s in the contract. Sales have sold it. The boss has promised it. Marketing has announced it. We need to book the revenue in the quarter. And so on and so on and so on. Generally, our bosses aren’t just out to make our lives a misery with these requests.) But if a thing can’t be done, you need to say so. And then – as we’ve mentioned previously – you need to say what can be done. Perhaps you can’t give them an Xbox for Christmas but you can give them something else.

The way we to do that is, quite simply, to build a plan. Then, using the plan, you can see what’s achievable and what’s not achievable – which you can then use to renegotiate the initial request as needed, instead of just saying ‘yes’ to the task straight away.

What’s in a plan?

A plan consists of five things:

1. What (precisely) are you trying to do?
2. What jobs have to be done to get to #1?
3. Who’s going to make sure the jobs gets done?
4. Who’s going to do those jobs in #2?
5. What are we going to do when things don’t turn out as expected?

A plan ends up being built around four parameters or factors:

• WHAT – What are we trying to do?
• WHEN – When will it be done?
• WORK – The amount of work involved in getting the thing done.
• QUALITY – There are jobs in the plan which are about ensuring the quality of what gets delivered. These are things like testing, reviews, quality assurance, signoffs and so on.

By varying the four parameters you can come up with different ways to satisfy the boss’s letter to Santa Claus.

So let’s say, for example, that the project has to be done by a certain date. This is what the boss has told you; this is her letter to Santa.

Then maybe you can’t give them everything she needs by that date, but you can offer a partial solution. Or maybe you can hit the date but you need more people or a bigger budget in order to do that. And so on. You can offer these different choices.

Ideally, you can give them that Xbox for Christmas. But if you can’t, the plan will keep you honest. It will stop you from promising something you can’t deliver. After all, you don’t want your boss to come down on Christmas morning and find that Santa didn’t come at all and that they’ve got an empty stocking.

And so …

When you get handed that next project, don’t say ‘Sure’ and run off and start doing stuff. Take a little time out. Build a plan. It won’t take you that long. In fact I think you’ll be surprised at how much you can get done in a short space of time. Then go talk to your boss.

And finally, if you want any more information on how to build a plan, I can highly recommend my book, What You Need To Know About Project Management.³⁸