Evaluating and improving my project planning?

[Jamie Elis]

I have concluded that I am a klutz when it comes to project planning, and weaker yet, in collaborative project planning when those of us working together are starting from scratch or I know more than the other person conceptually or practically but do not have the vocabulary at a fluent level. I seem to do best when I have quantitative information at hand or maybe that just shuts people up because they assume that if you speak numbers you know more than they do!

I am good at the outcome statement part, but it takes me quite a few tries to get to a well-formulated verbally expressed outcome or drawing/diagram/design and I have to keep re-tying my actions to the desired outcome or they take on lives of their own.

I do best if I work backwards, with pen in hand and an annotated calendar in sight.

If I don't sketch out the sequence of actions, I may go off and smell the flowers, forget where I am and what I am doing and why. A large percentage of the time, this payoffs in other projects that are moved forward, like wandering around the hardware store to find the right saw blade and getting a bunch of other stuff bought or specified that is not even on the SDMB list, such as far off birthday presents, color samples, etc.

Does anyway have any ideas on concepts, books, quizzes, etc for evaluating one's own skills in project planning, how to improve, and how to improve in working collaboratively in project planning

 

[Foxman]

I have concluded that I am a klutz when it comes to project planning, and weaker yet, in collaborative project planning when those of us working together are starting from scratch or I know more than the other person conceptually or practically but do not have the vocabulary at a fluent level. I seem to do best when I have quantitative information at hand or maybe that just shuts people up because they assume that if you speak numbers you know more than they do!

I am good at the outcome statement part, but it takes me quite a few tries to get to a well-formulated verbally expressed outcome or drawing/diagram/design and I have to keep re-tying my actions to the desired outcome or they take on lives of their own.

I do best if I work backwards, with pen in hand and an annotated calendar in sight.

If I don't sketch out the sequence of actions, I may go off and smell the flowers, forget where I am and what I am doing and why. A large percentage of the time, this payoffs in other projects that are moved forward, like wandering around the hardware store to find the right saw blade and getting a bunch of other stuff bought or specified that is not even on the SDMB list, such as far off birthday presents, color samples, etc.

Does anyway have any ideas on concepts, books, quizzes, etc for evaluating one's own skills in project planning, how to improve, and how to improve in working collaboratively in project planning

From what I've experienced, the key to project planning is the vision. If you got that down and clear then the pieces to make that happen come into focus naturally. Your brain automatically fills in the gap from where you are to where you want to go.

I don't think you need to read anything to improve (assuming you are talking about personal/smaller work based projects) smiply chunking down the major parts to get done along with deadlines, then breaking those further down into next actions is all I've ever needed.

 

[Jamie Elis]

vision, absolutely, but I need a total tune up!

In searching for ideas on this, I have mainly been directed to rubrics for evaluating particular high school projects. Although not much applicability to my generic need because they are so project specific, I noticed that one gave a student more points for "reflection on the process at various points". I think that is priceless but I still need more guidance. Also, comes to mind that different kinds of projects might need different evaluation points in their planning--writing and construction projects are a little different in their demands for space. I am especially interested in ideas for good practices for the parts of projects that require "playing well with others".