Five Immutable Principles of Project Managment

I'm headed to Fort Worth to speak at the PMI Chapter meeting and conduct a workshop. The topics start with the Immutable Principles of Project Management. Many authors have their lists of principles and practices. Here's what has emerged over the decades for me.

The five immutable principles of project management are:

1. Know where you are going by defining “done” at some point in the future. This point may be far in the future – months or years from now. Or closer in the future days or weeks from now.
2. Have some kind of plan to get to where you are going. This plan can be simple or it can be complex. The fidelity of the plan depends on the tolerance for risk by the users of the plan.
3. Understand the resources needed to execute the plan. How much time and money is needed to reach the destination. This can be fixed or it can be variable.
4. Identify the impediments to progress along the way to the destination. Have some means of removing, avoiding, or ignoring these impediments.
5. Have some way to measure your planned progress, not just your progress. Progress to Plan must be measured in units of physical percent complete.

For the programmatic aspects of project management, these are the fundamentals of success. If you don't have these principles put into practice, your project is probably headed to the ditch.