Projects@Work - Responding to Change

In Artful Making, Harvard Business School professor and colleague Rob Austin and his coauthor Lee Devin discuss a $125 million IT project disaster in which the company refused to improvise and change from the detailed plan set down prior to the project’s start. “ ‘Plan the work and work the plan’ was their implicit mantra,” they write. “And it led them directly to a costly and destructive course of action.... We’d all like to believe that this kind of problem is rare in business. It’s not.”

Every project has knowns and unknowns, certainties and uncertainties, and therefore every project has to balance planning and adapting. Balancing is required because projects also run the gamut from production-style ones in which uncertainty is low, to exploration-style ones in which uncertainty is high. Exploration-style projects require a process that emphasizes envisioning and then exploring into that vision rather than detailed planning and relatively strict execution of tasks.

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