The Art of Project Management

3.2. Approaching plans: the three perspectives

You may have noticed how each of the deliverables mentioned earlier represents one of two perspectives on the project: business or engineering. On many projects, these two views compete with each other. This is a fundamental planning mistake. Planning should rarely be a binary, or either/or, experience. Instead, it should be an integration and synthesis of what everyone can contribute.

To make this happen, a project manager must recognize that each perspective contributes something unique that cannot be replaced by more of something else (i.e., no amount of marketing strategy will improve engineering proficiency, and vice versa). For good results, everyone involved in project planning must have a basic understanding of each perspective.

The following coverage of planning is industrial strength. If you see questions or situations that don't apply because of the size of your team or scope of your project, feel free to skim or skip them. I don't expect that everything I cover here applies to any single project. However, I'm trying to provide value to you for not only this project, but also the next one and the one after that. There are many angles and questions here that will prove useful to you in the long run, even if some of it doesn't apply to what you're working on today.

3.2.1. The business perspective

The business view focuses ...