The Verdict Is In

UUsing project management to plan my wedding was definitely a bit of an experiment. I knew that it would help me be organized, remain on budget, and finish all my wedding tasks. But I didn’t know how much of a difference it would make in the end. And now I wonder would I have gotten to the same place without using project management?

With the help of Olympian, McKayla Maroney I’m going to break it down.

 

PRO: Best schedule ever

All the work that goes into the initiating and planning phases of planning a wedding with project management (and that is lots and lots of work) outputs the best schedule you could ever imagine. It’s detailed, accurate with timing, and comprehensive. Yes, maybe there will be things you missed that didn’t make it onto the schedule but they are going to be very minor. You definitely won’t forget any major items or run out of time if you use project management to plan your wedding.

 

CON: Not everyone
appreciates a schedule

I’m not referring to you because the very fact that you are reading this blog means that you enjoy planning and scheduling to some extent. It’s your fiancée I am referring to. My schedule led to one disagreement in particular between Justin and me because he didn’t think we needed to be picking out groomsmen’s suits four months before the wedding. I thought Justin was just procrastinating because the schedule said choosing suits was a deliverable (and I follow schedules with a fault). Justin thought I was a bridezilla because I was pushing him to do something long before he thought it needed to be done. Point being, not everyone appreciates the level of organization project management brings along with it. So keep that in mind if your fiancée is not as much of a Type A personality as you are.

 

PRO: Deep thoughts

Project management gets you thinking ahead so you’ll know that you do want a cake but don’t need to save the top layer, that you would rather spend more money on a photographer than a DJ, that you don’t want strangers attending, and that you want all your groomsmen to wear grow sideburns (yes, this actually was a conversation we had). Looking back at my early blog posts, I’m amazed how much we knew about the wedding months and months before it actually happened. And we mostly stuck to everything we discussed.

 

CON: Time monster

All the detailed discussions, documenting the discussions, and repurposing them in various documents is time consuming. Planning a wedding is a time eater anyway so adding on the task of using project management only makes it even more time consuming.

 

PRO: Knowing it all

Because of all the scheduling and thinking Justin and I did early on we really knew to a T what exactly we had to do and when, to pull off the wedding of our dreams. There was never any ambiguity, wondering, or wrong turns. For once in my life I could actually say that I knew everything.

 

CON: Knowing it all

Knowing everything can be dangerous. I am pretty sure I had a false sense of security because I fully trusted the project management processes to take care of everything. Any good project manager knows that there are going to be unforeseen events and costs. Project management doesn’t protect against those but it does do a good job of stopping the damage from being so severe. In my case, I stopped using my brain and just paid attention to my task list. Unfortunately because of that some important things were overlooked.

 

So, was it worth it?

That is such a hard question to answer. To really know I would have had to have two identical weddings, one planned with project management and one planned without. There is a part of me that feels that with all the information available on the internet for planning a wedding Justin and I would have been able to put together a comprehensive schedule, have deep conversations, and plan everything in advance, but we would have spent  a lot of time researching the process. The nice thing about using project management is that everything is set up for you to begin with. And now that I have created wedding specific project management templates, it makes it all that much easier for you. If the worst con was that it was time consuming, that’s not so bad. Time is money, right?

All-in-all my gut tells me that yes, using project management to plan my wedding was worth it.

Queue the big smile from Miss Maroney!