Project Management and "Over-Planning" Are Not the Same Thing

Project management and “over planning” are not the same thing.

From time to time I speak with founders who say, in response to the idea of project management:

“That’s nice, but we don’t want to over plan.”

Meaning, they don’t want to become so rigid that they can’t flex when they need to. Or they don’t want to spend so much time crafting the perfect plan that the execution never happens.

As a project manager, I don’t want that either. It sounds like a terrible waste of a good project!

The truth is, planning is only one part of project management, it’s not the entire package.

If done smartly, we can and should allow room for change within planning.

And, let’s not kid ourselves here, if we’ve been around long enough, we all know projects never go as planned anyway 😅.

Conversely, we don’t want to be so soft with planning that the entire exercise becomes meaningless and gets us nowhere.

(It’s a well known fact/quote/song lyric that when you fail to plan you plan to fail.)

So here’s the bottom line with planning:

✅ Over planning can stifle creativity.

✅ Under planning can result in missing the target.

✅ And comprehensive project management takes into account that a flexible plan is only part of the puzzle.