Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast. Earn 37 Professional Development Units: When it comes to identifying a reason for why so many projects fail then Bryan Barrow (http://nova-consulting.co.uk - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/bryanbarrow) has a simple answer for you. He says that a root cause of poor project delivery is poor planning. But he also says that this is not a failure of project management, but instead this is a failure of project leadership. So if poor planning is the culprit then there has to be a better way to plan our projects. Right? Right! Bryan is an advocate of planning your project with index cards. So in our interview we are going to first discuss what the problem is with planning your project using sticky notes, and then we’ll look at the benefits of index card planning for your project, in particular on improved leadership, greater financial control, improved project governance and improved cross-department team-working and collaboration. And by the way… Bryan Barrow will be speaking on the topic of Index Card Planning on April 29th at the 2014 Project Zone Congress in Frankfurt Germany. So if you are listening to this interview before April 2014 you can find out more at http://projectzonecongress.com/ Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode # 264. This is the Project Management Podcast at www.pm-podcast.com and I am Cornelius Fichtner. Nice to have you with us. When it comes to identifying a reason for why so many projects fail, then Bryan Barrow has a simple answer for you. He says that a root cause of poor project delivery is poor planning. But he also says that this is not a failure of project management but instead, this is a failure of project leadership. So if poor planning is the culprit, then there has to be a better way to plan our projects, right? Yes, right! Bryan is an advocate of planning your project with index cards. So in our interview, we are going to first discuss what the problem is with planning your project using sticky notes and then we'll look at the benefits of index card planning for your project in particular on improved leadership, greater financial control, improved project governance and improved cross-department team working and collaboration. And by the way, Bryan Barrow will be speaking on the topic of index card planning on April 29 at the 2014 Project Zone Congress in Frankfurt, Germany. So if you're listening to this interview before April of 2014, you can find out more at www.projectzonecongress.com. And now, let’s put all the cards on the table. Enjoy the interview. Podcast Interview Female voice: The Project Management Podcast’s feature Interview: Today with Bryan Barrow, Project Management Consultant and Speaker. Cornelius Fichtner: Hello Bryan! Welcome to The Project Management Podcast™! Bryan Barrow: Hi Cornelius. Thanks for having me. Cornelius Fichtner: You're very welcome. Thank you for joining us today here. We want to talk about how to plan your project using index cards. But before we go to the index cards, I think one of the main reasons why you came up with this approach is because the usual paper-based or post-it-based approach that people have for doing a planning workshop doesn’t really work all that well, does it? Bryan Barrow: No and it's not really to knock the use of post-it notes or sticky notes in planning because it is a very good approach mainly because it's collaborative. You're getting people in a room asking people for their ideas and contributions and trying to plan the project together. So far, so good but there are still some drawbacks. One of those being that quite often you rely on subject matter experts and the knowledge in their heads. Another one is a low-level of knowledge transfer. So you can get people in a room, get them to throw out their ideas but it doesn’t nece
