Stray The Course

It's nice to have a project plan. Something that breaks the path from beginning to end into smaller steps. Then you can know how far you've gotten. You can define milestones. You can discover dependencies. You can identify hang-ups.

In the Iraq situation, for example, holding an election was a milestone. But you couldn't hold one there today. That milestone passed us going backwards a long time ago.

You can discover dependencies. So long as Saddam is alive, dare we leave Iraq? A friendly judge could release him. Could his former friends put him back in place as a puppet and govern under his name? If so, all we've demonstrated is the futility of war.

We're hung on a hook. Drying in a cloud of flies.

When you don't have a project plan that leads to success, how can you manage?