Time for another quick guide to project management blog postings made recently. Given we’ve just been looking at project planning, it is serendipitous that there have been a few posts out there on assumptions.

You definitely need to pay attention to the assumptions you are making when you are planning. As we will see in our next project management guide on scheduling, you must capture them in the process. Making sure you do this gives you a number of advantages. Kent McDonald’s post, Assumptions, Communication, and Donkeys on the Project Connections blog highlights this, and what you should be doing with these assumptions once captured.

As Kent says, one of the things you must do is revisit the assumptions regularly. The environment your project is in will be continually evolving, and those changes may effect the veracity of your assumptions. In addition, it may turn out that an assumption that everyone thought was right turned out to be wrong, even without the environment changing – it just took time to come to light. John Reiling has a post at the PMCrunch blog, Check Your Assumptions, that discusses this in more detail.

Finally, you need to check you are actually capturing all of your assumptions. We all make assumptions in our day to day life that we never consciously recognise. This often happens when we are in a situation we think is the same as one we have previously been in. Unfortunately, because we don’t consciously think about these assumptions, we don’t give ourselves a chance to verify them! Pawel Brodzinski at Software Project Management has a good post, Avoid Unconscious Assumptions with some useful examples of this.

Hope you’ve found this round-up useful. See you again on Monday!