The Wedding Planner

Planning a new project is like planning a wedding. At a very high level, everything is known, seems simple and is more or less cut-and-paste with minor adaptations of a well-known formula. At a very low level, it is a marathon: There are lots of details to take into account, lots of unknowns (because typically we do it for the first time), unexpected events, dependencies and even risks.

… and like any weddings, bringing an expert, someone that already celebrated weddings – or someone who it is its profession – can limit risk, like a wedding planner. A wedding planner is not a chef, a DJ, a florist, a celebrant, but knows how to do that without being a specialist:

  • he will synchronize at the right time the major steps which generally are the most complex to organize;
  • he will make sure that the location is available, because a lot depends on it;
  • he will order the bride and groom to choose guests as soon as possible, because it is generally contentious;
  • he will precede the selection of the dress because that is what makes the bride happy;
  • he will make sure to hire a third party to do the boy’s bachelor party because it is not a priority;
  • he will offer a simple choice for the evening party and then take over for the selection of 2-3 options;
  • he will take care of the meal because he knows that the brides think it is not important but in reality it is what the guests expect most from the evening because they “pay” for something;
  • he will organized an afternoon of shopping to simplify life for guests and the bride and groom – although it is not the purpose of the wedding, it is one of the only things that will remain afterwards.

Who are wedding planners… Architects, Project Managers, Business Analysts?

In other words, bring anyone who as more experience, an external point of view, a specific expertise that can be helpful to a team and whatever he will do, things will go better.

But in technology, who is this person? An architect? A project manager? A business Analyst? A jack of all trades?

A wedding planner is a good specialist with a solid foundation in all other disciplines.

An architect that could be a good project manager, a business analyst technical enough to appreciate what an architect could tell, an architect that can manage stakeholders, etc. Bottom line, a person who is able to make things happen by compensating what is missing on top of his own expertise.

But which of them can be a wedding planner? All the best of them. But they are rare. I estimate them to 5 to 8% of all the task force. They are all very busy being the best in their expertise. Sometimes even being the bottleneck on their own project.

So generally, the only choice that has to be done is: which project can suffer at the expense of the one who needs a wedding planner?