PM Laws: Ascend the Project Knowledge Slope

One of the truisms of projects is that you know the least about your project (or product) at the beginning and most about it at the end. This fact pervades every aspect of projects and how we manage them:

• When making a decision, you will always know more tomorrow. Some decisions are improved by waiting; some benefit from timeliness over gathering more knowledge. It's not always easy to know which is which.
• Budgets and dates are usually established at the beginning when we know the least about projects. There's a good reason for estimating these early, but it does make things more complicated.
• Project documents are intended to help us ascend the knowledge slope. Docs that help teams and stakeholders to learn collectively work best. Boilerplate text doesn't help.
• You may have planned your project expertly, but it will change almost as soon as you sink your baseline. Do you have a system that helps the plan evolve fluidly in concert with your understanding of the project?

The most successful project managers I've met are the ones that run their projects with awareness that they can't know everything from the get-go. Learning and adjusting will be the norm. The ones I've coached who struggle in the job are often railing against this reality. If you refuse to baseline your plan before your requirements are signed off, you're fighting the curve, my friend.