There is a time and place for exotic word choice. Your project plan is not that place. Verb Sprawl creates ambiguity and noise. Verb Sprawl slows your planning and slows the interpretation of your plan.

The RACI matrix almost got it right but still harbors too much ambiguity. In your team’s formal planning, govern only what is worth documenting outside email, and nothing else. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Project-specific calculations are important but can be optimistic and unrealistic. What’s more constructive is cross-project prioritization. Instead of sweating calculations, ensure your organization starts, completes, and prioritizes the right work.

Bundling a group of highly-paid employees into a group labeled a Steering Committee fosters a culture of ambiguity, ego, exclusivity, and high cost. Assign those individuals to maximize speed, quality, inclusivity, and durability.

In innovation, most attention is the work within the project. Before your next project begins, consider what questions your team should answer. This documentation provides transparency, alignment, and sets you up for success.

Manage your team like a factory because you want discipline, predictability, rhythm. Manage like a factory because you care about speed, quality, and waste.

A script is a simple, raw, unambiguous format to get the sequence of actions on paper, primed for a Future State Process Flow.

Surely some activities in your organization are important to measure. A scorecard captures the “Metrics That Matter” - Leading and Lagging. Historical, Current, and Target values.

Barriers, Risks, Issues, Questions (BRIQ) - until you know exactly what to do with them, get them on paper somewhere - a kind of parking lot!

Your colleagues, especially your manager, need to know if you’re bored, buried, or somewhere in between. Share your workload so the team can balance the workload!

There is a time and place for exotic word choice. Your project plan is not that place. Verb Sprawl creates ambiguity and noise. Verb Sprawl hurts your focus, speed, quality, and the employee experience.

Before you leap into testing a new process or technology, formalize the general expectations about test planning and execution. For example, the number of test phases, test environments, and the documentation expectations for the test plan.