Down to the wire
Surprises will happen. If your plan relies on everything going to plan, you should expect those surprises to create real problems.
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The following is a completely made-up bad-dream scenario, but bear with me.
You’ve bought a new house and you're going to move. But you're too busy to handle the move yourself, so you've hired a full-service moving company.
They’ve promised to take everything from your old house — your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book collection, your grandmother's wedding dress, legal documents, kids’ kindergarten graduation photos ... all of it, right down to your socks and your nail clippers — and place it right where you can find it in your new house.
And as usual in a bad dream, there's a catch: Your old house will be bulldozed to make room for a superhighway, on the same day that you'll move into your new house.
If the movers goof this up, you might be left with nothing but the clothes on your back.
If you're like me, that's the kind of dream that would wake you up in a cold sweat.
Believe it or not, I'm now helping a client who's in a similar situation.
Their old subscription-based CRM will be decommissioned this week. Some time ago, they arranged with a specialist to move all that data into CiviCRM. As of today, they’re still not sure that the migration went well, and there are several indications that it did not.
I’m with them now to ensure they at least have some options — in the form of a raw data dump from the old system — in case they need to go back and get data that was missed.
It's a little better than the nightmare I described above, but not much.
We could say it's as if the movers, instead of just leaving thier things in the old house, have dumped all their belongings in a giant jumbled pile in Siberia. If they want their grandmother's wedding dress, they might just find it — if they can get to Siberia and dig through the pile.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because things don't always go as planned.
In any project of significant size, there will be surprises. You can't know what they will be. That's the nature of surprises. But there will be some.
Just as an experienced general in combat will, whenever possible, hold some force in reserve as a hedge against the unforeseen, so an experienced project planner will keep some resources in reserve on any given project.
In your world and mine, those resources are not troops, but time, money, and manpower.
If you’re smart, and if you’ve got a choice, you’ll hold some of that in reserve — a little extra time; a percentage of your actual budget; a few of your volunteers — to deal with the inevitable surprises.
The time to do that is before you begin. Because once you’ve committed everything, there’s no room for surprises.
All the best,
A.