[lifeisstillgood]

Honestly this feels like so much crap. I refuse to believe any project can be planned more than one "phase" out - that is one technical person can sit down and say "yes I see how all the parts can be done and I could do it given time and nothing else". Ie the next step onto a stone across the pond.

Anything beyond that is what I call the zipper delusion - the idea that with enough planning we can move ahead like a zipper and all the parts, the third party deliverables just come together like a zipper.

Nah. A delusion brought on be looking back at a project and going "hey we did it" as opposed to remembering the hellscape accurately

Yes enormous projects are achieved, but it's not like it's a plan - we know we can lay a train track on land that's about 2% gradient (the technical next phase) but the bit that lays train track from New York to San Francisco is not a plan. And this sort of stuff where people want third party risk offsetting and so on is much more "build train tracks over the State of ohio" - it's an adventure needing venture funding.

I think we would do much better stopping calling them plans and start calling them "ventures". You can be a venture manager for sure but stop asking for dates and deadline

So the real criteria for success for a project is "does this feel like Oppenheimer saying "we need to build a town in the middle of the desert for the worlds best scientists"? If so scale down your project or be very very sure your existence depends on not failing.

[lifeisstillgood]

in constant search of homey analogies and metaphors - I would say plans that need to work like a zipper, are doomed to fail but plans that will work like a patchwork quilt, give usable results even from the first patch and are resilient to setbacks, and importantly can be industrialised - same patch fabric stitches can speed things up