Seeing the whole picture

Sometimes the shortsightedness of people really confuses me. Let me just say here that I think it's important to think about the long term when you're working on a project. Especially if it's a big project or an important project.

In what ways might the project grow in the future? Is the solution you're pursuing going to be conducive to that growth?

It's a simple question that doesn't get answered enough. You can always expand what you have now, except when you can't. Yes, I said that. It makes sense I swear: it's easy to say that you're going to expand your current site later until you figure out that the path you're going down is not actually capable of expanding in that way. At the very least, there should be a rough timeline for expansions, and a plan to handle them when they come around.

Things like: "In one year, we'd like to have a dynamic solution for publishing our content. At that time, we'll re-build our site from scratch because we're starting with a static collection of pages right now." and "In three years we'll have a community built into our site where users will discuss the features of our product and report back to us on how they like it. We'll do our dynamic conversion in one year with that in mind." are good statements to have documented about a project.

Things like: "In three months we need to migrate this existing site to a new server with that other site. I have no idea how we're going to do that, but you're gonna need to take care of the permissions and the systems and pay attention to the mome raths and that's it. Should be a piece of cake. We could probably even get it done by the end of this month." isn't really a useful statement about the timeline or a plan for doing something, especially when some of it is nonsense.

One defense that's often used against this format is "But I don't know how long this is going to take me, I've never done it before!" and that's usually valid - it's hard to do a time estimate when you haven't done anything like that before. But that shouldn't stop you from making a plan of actions you need to do and the order they need to happen in. Even if it's only "as far as we know" and might change later. Then you can log the time it actually takes to do the things and you'll have a better idea of how long this type of thing takes in the future.

Why is this a good idea? Why waste time on all this planning crap? Because then you have fewer surprises, and no secrets. You don't have different ideas about where the project is going - everyone is on the same page. You aren't blindly forging to a place you'll never get to because you don't know where that place is or what it looks like. I've heard plans like this compared to little flags in the sand - they can move from time to time, and they often do, but they keep everyone moving in the same general direction as long as they're visible on the horizon.

Some surprises are good. You know, like "Surprise! Happy Birthday!" and "I got you these chocolates just to let you know how sweet I think you are." But some surprises are not so desirable, like "Your plan is to re-do the entire thing from scratch by tomorrow? I thought we were just making some little modifications to what we already have!" or "We need to support a forum now? How on earth are we going to do that?"

Lose the secrets and surprises; they're not helping anyone.

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