Corporate Game: The Planning Pantomime

Concept:

“The Planning Pantomime” is a satirical take on corporate project management where schedules are regularly updated, polished, and presented but not used to drive real action. Schedule used as props in a carefully choreographed performance. The game thrives on form over function and celebrates the illusion of control.

Key Roles:

1. The Master Planner: Crafts convincing Gantt charts perfectly aligned with nothing in particular.
2. The Project Manager: Delivers confident updates, artfully dodging difficult questions with jargon, optimism, and a polished tone.
3. The Sponsor: Smiles and nods through presentations. As long as the charts look good, they won’t ask for inconvenient evidence of progress.
4. Reporting Analyst: Knows the report is fiction but plays along. Updates the dashboard five minutes before the meeting with whatever numbers “look right.”
5. The Risk Manager: Expert in identifying risks either painfully obvious or utterly abstract. Uses phrases like “We’re monitoring it closely” and tools like Heat Maps and Monte Carlo simulations, preferably without interpretation.
6. The PMO: Enforces process compliance while gently ignoring whether the process produces value.
7. The Auditor: Occasionally appears to ensure the right forms are filled out, not whether they reflect reality.

Objectives:

Maintain the illusion of success for as long as possible. Avoid triggering real scrutiny, budget reallocation, or timeline corrections.

Rules of Play:

• Schedules must be submitted in the official tool monthly.
• Submit schedule updates on time, regardless of what’s actually happening. Timeliness equals trustworthiness.
• Always show progress. Add a milestone, shift a date, or rename a task – anything to imply motion.
• If real events deviate from the plan, quietly revise the schedule to reflect the new reality without drawing attention to the shift.
• Regularly run easy-to-pass recognised schedule health checks that look complex but ask little. Display the results proudly in executive reports.
• Use project control methods that produce already known comforting stories. Present misleading schedule progress metrics in a state-of-art dashboard.
• Create small, solvable problems to stay relevant. Then proudly present the solution preferably to a problem you quietly caused weeks ago.
• Use sophisticated, officially recognised enterprise-grade project management system. The more complex and harder to navigate, the better. Mastering obscure menus and buried functions earns respect. When questioned, produce a 100-page Gantt chart pdf report and say, “It’s all in the system.”
• If someone tries to make a real decision using the schedule, distract them with a colourful burndown chart or animated dashboard.

Winning Conditions:

Project dashboard stays green until next black swan event identified.

• The original baseline is unrecognisable but still referred to as the official version.
• Corrective action meetings are never scheduled or always deferred.
• No one notices if team stop updating schedule months ago.
• You heroically solve problems that should not even exist and get praised for it.
• Final reports celebrate “strong governance and disciplined planning,” regardless of the chaos beneath.

Master Level:

• Stage a crisis just early enough to appear visionary.
• Let a small issue grow quietly. Time discovery for maximum drama, minimal blame.
• Then roll out a highly structured recovery plan featuring a re-baselined schedule titled the “Optimised Recovery Plan”.
• Add a new “Focus Area” workstream to maximise additional cost.
• Schedule a “Lessons Learned” session, then quietly postponed it to the post-delivery stage
• Present the recovery as a case study at the next project control conference. Accept awards. Repeat if necessary.

Any resemblance to actual methods, systems, people or projects is purely coincidental.