Question 4: When will you see a result?

Timelines are fundamental to project success.

So question 4 in this series for project sponsors and leaders is When will you see a result?

If results are too far away there will be a loss of momentum and things wander off course. Projects with distant pay-offs are far less likely to succeed.

If nothing is planned to be delivered in the next six months then it is unlikely you will see anything from the project.

There always needs to be a project plan with a timeline regardless of the level of uncertainty

All plans are a guess. No plan survives contact with reality, but it does externalise how the team are thinking about the project.

Don’t wait weeks for the plan to be finessed – create the conditions where the team can share ideas and label the emerging areas

It is also important to show the unknowns or resources constraints that could derail the plan. Even better is an indication of when those questions will be answered.

Kurt Lewin famously observed that you never truly understand a system until you try to change it. The same applies to projects. You don’t really know what it will take to deliver until you have produced something. The act of actually handing something over to the customer is full of lessons and exposes the real constraints.

So the fifth question for a sponsor is a grounding one: When will you see a result?