In this lesson we will analyze the third planning principle, which is called the rolling wave approach. Usually, when you plan a project, you really want to get to a very high level of details. Meaning that you want to know at a certain point that tomorrow Jack Smith needs to do an activity from nine to noon. When it comes to big projects lasting years and having hundreds of thousand different activities and thousands of people involved, this level of detail can be very tricky, especially if you think about the future. There's no point in saying that Jack Smith needs to do a certain activity for four hours in two years and a half. You really don't know what's going to happen in two years and half, you don’t know if jack Smith is still working with you, you don’t even know if you need to do that activity or even if you need to do that part of the project at that point. On the one side, this level of details doesn't make any sense, especially for activities that are far in the future. On the other side, we cannot say that we just plan what is near and do not plan the future because we need to have a global view of the project, from the beginning to the end to meet the overall deadline and budget and to perform all the activities to reach the scope. We need to find a solution in order to manage this problem: we want to be very detailed in the short-term, and we need to have a clear view in the long-term. The Rolling wave approach is exactly the way that we use to settle this problem. It is pretty simple, you just consider a window from now to the next future, let's say six months, and you are going to have a very high level of detail within that window, in this case we say that we are programming the project, because we go to the maximum level of detail. Regarding whatever happens after these six months it is still going to be planned, but at a completely different level of details. We are going to use the concept of planning package. We are going to plan packages that have a lower degree of detail and contain various activities each. In this way, you can have a clear view on what's going to happen but you don't want to be too precise about it. Then, let’s say after one month you start your controlling activities and you also revise the plan. You have one more month of history behind so you can add a new month, let’s say the seventh on the original plan, to your planning window. In this way, you go on programming one month after the other, using this chance also to revise the programming of the next months and the overall plan with the planning packages of the following months. One month is done, a new month is in… this is the rolling wave approach. Once again, these are the three main principles: feed forward control, usage of milestones, and Rolling wave planning and these are the principles you should use to make a correct plan. Anyway, we need to consider that to have a full plan we probably need to cover many other things, so what are the main knowledge areas that we should cover in a project management plan? Of course, we need to have scope, cost, and time. But, also risk and quality and procurement and also everything that is connected with stakeholders’ management, HR or the communication plan. There are so many things you need to plan to do a good project planning, as you can imagine we cannot plan everything for every single project, especially when it goes to small and simple projects. What I want to stress is that for each project, even for the simplest one we need to plan at least the scope, the time and the cost, even though this is not always obvious in many cases. You may find companies that still think that planning is just time planning, planning is just a Gantt chart, planning is just scheduling. So, this poor project planning actually results in poor performances of project management.
