Suggestions for Effective Planning

Here are some ideas to help you plan effectively:

• Plan to plan. It is always difficult to get people together to develop a plan. The planning session itself should be planned or it may turn into a totally disorganized meeting of the type that plagues many organizations. This means that an agenda must be prepared, the meeting should be time-limited to the degree possible, and people should be kept on track. That is, if someone goes off on a tangent, the meeting facilitator should get the person back on track as quickly as possible. There are many excellent guides to running meetings (e.g., Mining Group Gold, by Tom Kayser [Kayser, 1995]); the reader is referred to those.

• The people who must implement a plan should participate in preparing it. Otherwise, you risk having contributors who feel no sense of commitment to the plan; their estimates may be erroneous, and major tasks may be forgotten.

  Rule: The people who must do the work should participate in developing the plan.

• The first rule of planning is to be prepared to replan. Unexpected obstacles will undoubtedly crop up and must be handled. This also means that you should not plan in too much detail if there is a likelihood that the plan will have to be changed, as this wastes time.

• Because unexpected obstacles will crop up, always conduct a risk analysis to anticipate the most likely ones. Develop Plan B just in case Plan A doesn’t work. Why not just use Plan B in the first place? Because Plan A is better but has a few weaknesses. Plan B has weaknesses also, but they must be different from those in Plan A, or there is no use in considering Plan B a backup.

  The first rule of planning is to be prepared to replan!

  The simple way to do a risk analysis is to ask, “What could go wrong?” This should be done for the schedule, work performance, and other parts of the project plan. Sometimes simply identifying risks can help avert them, but, if that cannot be done, at least you’ll have a backup plan available. One caution: if you are dealing with very analytical people, they may go into analysis paralysis here. You are not trying to identify every possible risk—just those that are fairly likely.

  Identify project risks and develop contingencies to deal with them if they occur.

• Begin by looking at the purpose of doing whatever is to be done. Develop a problem statement. All actions in an organization should be taken to achieve a result, which is another way of saying “solve a problem.” Be careful here to identify what the end user really needs to solve the problem. Sometimes we see projects in which the team thinks a solution is right for the client but that solution is never used, resulting in significant waste to the organization.

  Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.

  —Plautus (254–184 B.C.)

• Use the Work Breakdown Structure (discussed in chapter 5) to divide the work into smaller chunks for which you can develop accurate estimates for duration, cost, and resource requirements.