A wak in the fog

Rodney Turner put together a simple taxonomy of projects, based upon two questions;

• Do you know what you want?
• Do you know how you'll get there?

From these two questions you get one of four typs of projects;

• Painting by numbers
• Making a movie
• A Quest
• A walk in the fog

The skills and practices of project management (whatever flavour) is most suited to the Making a movie and Quest modes.

Painting by numbers is regarded as fairly simple and potentialy you can get away with just plain old common sense.

A walk in the fog is a metaphor for someone who is lost.  In this case traditional project management can help you get to your unknown destination quicker, but you might not actually want to get there.  The agile/iterative approach may be a better bet in these cases, as you shrink the steps and thus the risk of heading in the wrong direction.

Which quadrant does your project fall into?  Where do you want to be?

What do you need to get there?

(Thanks Glen for pointing me at that Mosaic article.)