Sun Zi said: When our plans reveal an advantage, we should monitor and try to help create the right external conditions to facilitate its execution

孫子曰：計利以聽，乃為之勢，以佐其外。勢者，因利而制權也。

Sun Zi said:
When our plans reveal an advantage, we should monitor and try to help create the right external conditions to facilitate its execution. The exact conditions may not appear as planned, so we might have to adapt the plan based on a reassessment of advantage from the actual condition that arises.


Parallel to Project Management
After careful assessments at the start of the project, we end up with a project plan to guide the execution of the entire project. When making the plans, it is common to make some explicit or implicit assumptions under which our plans can be executed perfectly. But in reality, as we are executing the plans, some of these assumptions may not come true. At the same time, there could be many other conditions that happen during the project execution that makes it difficult to follow the plans entirely.

It is therefore necessary to constantly monitor the project execution against our plans. If possible, we should try to help make our assumptions in the plan come true. For example, if we assume in our plan that we will get additional financial resources at a certain time, we should continuously monitor this and assign someone to follow-up on this until the financial resources that we are expecting is safely received. Similarly, if we assume that a certain unfavourable event will not happen during the project, then we should try to do what is possible within our means to prevent it from happening or minimize its impact if it happens.

However, despite our best efforts to create the external conditions which facilitate our plan, there will be cases where things do not go as expected, and it is beyond our ability to rectify it. In this case, flexibility is needed to adapt the plan to the new conditions that arises as part of the project’s execution.