Making It Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management

17.1. Changing prospective

I was anxious to get going so I continued, "Martin also suggested two other things. The first was that we plan the project from the end to the beginning. He called this objective driven logic."

Luigi asked, "Why do that? It's only going to make the whole thing confusing."

"According to the consultant, looking at it from the point of view of 'It's finished, now how did we get here?' will give us a different perspective on the plan, and help us create a better one." I gave them Martha's example verbatim. "Think of a jigsaw puzzle. When you dump it out of the box onto the table, the first thing you do is look at the picture on the box so you can see where you are supposed to end up."

Alice said, "Well, if your consultant does it that way we should probably give it a try."

It always amazes me how people accept so-called expert opinions. In the future, whenever I have a good idea, I'll just claim some consultant suggested it.

"What was the second thing, Will?" Mark asked, getting us back on track.

"We are going to put this plan on a time scale." I turned to the white board and began drawing vertical lines on it, about a sticker width apart. "The space between each pair of lines will represent one week. When we're done, we'll have a rough idea of how long this should take." When I finished putting the time scale up I turned around to face the group.

"I'm afraid there are two more things that I need to introduce about dependency charts: float and the critical ...