3 ways of project planning and which one you would prefer!

Whenever we set a goal, we or people who are concerned always ask when this goal going to be achieved. Basically, we start by setting a goal which is expected to deliver some value. How do we determine if this goal will actually result value.What is the measurement criteria of a goal.

Consider an example, lets say your goal is to learn Python Programming language so that you can build professional websites and work for companies part time to provide solution in Python. How will you measure value. First of all this is a individual goal which means no one is affected by this goal, however if this goal is set by the employer then concerned people will be your manager who would like to consider you in the python projects.

So how will you determine the size of this goal and duration it will take to achieve. And the way to achieve the determine is through planning!

There are 3 ways you may go ahead planning for this goal:

• Over- Planning - In this case you will just identify every little things about Python and start creating tasks for that. This could be very much detailed. Basically, you have created a plan which list all these detailed activities and then you try to derive the duration and estimation on this. 

This is good but there is a flaw in this approach. If the estimation comes out to be too long then it may happen that by the time you achieve your goal this programming language has been updated and possibly the latest major changes are not covered as part of the goal achievement.

• No - Planning - In this case you will just start somewhere and randomly work on something daily to achieve your goal. 

Issue with this approach is this will not help you or your concerned people to know how much time would be required to achieve the goal. As this is done randomly and you do not have data/tasks/activities listed which you could review and come up with some rough idea of duration and target date to achieve the goal.

•  Just Enough Planning - Final approach would be to do just enough planning to get you started. 

For example you will set a target for 5 days what you would like to achieve. After the end of 5 days you review your progress and the output and then make changes and plan again for next 5 days to accommodate the changes. This way you would continuously pushing yourself to achieve something which is meaningful and of some value. This can surely be giving you rough idea of target date of achieving the goal.

Now it is up to you which one is best suitable for you, my advise is to always go for adaptive planning. Please share your thoughts.