This is Stevea Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

We all want things to go perfectly.

We really do.

Melvin was planning to build a replica of San Francisco constructed from 35,000 used Q-tips.

It was going to be his magnum opus, his crowning achievement, his excuse

to buy Q-tips, which is a product he finds endlessly fascinating. I don't even want to know why.

And best of all, the wedding present to his fiancé Bernice. He knew that she loves handmade crafts

and his creative juices were flowing and being so stopped up by the Q-tips.

Unfortunately, it takes more than creative juices to construct a replica of San Francisco.

There are risks aplenty.

He got 13,261 Q-tips into the project, and then he discovered that his tiny Q-tip trolley car was positioned incorrectly

with the car occupying the space where Twin Peaks was

supposed to go. Oh, we call that an oops. We've all had oopses. Many moons ago, I was part of a

curriculum design team at Harvard Business School, charged with evaluating project management best

practices to include in the MBA curriculum. Being rather fanatical about cool productivity

tools, who'd have guessed it, I've happily used those tools and concepts ever since.

Now, one striking best practice is a concept, and it's a simple one. Most projects fail for

reasons that you can predict in advance. When our project is going on way too long and bleeding money like a

pit bull after a run-in with a porcupine, we just run to our boss and we say, I don't know what

happened. Maybe it was space aliens who shot us with a time distortion ray that made everything

take longer than expected. Possible. Very, very possible. But no, the real reason is that no one bothered to plan for the fact that every critical team member planned their summer vacation for a different week of summer. It blew up the team's ability to coordinate and turned the 12 weeks of summer into 12 actual days of progress. The thing is, we could have known that. Risk assessment could have

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