Recently I've been involved in wrestling some project plans into submissions for a project that is currently in flight. When I came on I established a simple iterative development plan to reach a particular delivery milestone in the project to get things moving while a more holistic plan was being developed on a background thread.

In contributing to the holistic plan I've started to think of project plans as works of fiction. Its not that I think the dates in the deliverables in this new plan are fictious, but I feel that sometimes project plans focus too much on the "what", and not enough on the "how".

This could be considered one of the big differences between the "big plan up front" and "iterative development" approaches. Both plans contain a list of "what" is to be developed, but in iterative development the resolution is much lower until your reach the point at which you need to start development (beginning of the iteration).

Tools like Microsoft Project certainly seem to favor "big plan up front" project management, but I am determined to figure out how I can bend the software to my will :)