General Dwight D. Eisenhower is said to have observed, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” The first part of that statement refers to how a given plan must be dynamic and adaptive to necessary change (which is another topic in itself), but the second, more profound part is what we’re talking about today. Planning is a process that’s invaluable to effectively running your business.
We respond to different issues in our operations with a set of expectations about a desired outcome – we think we can solve a problem within a given timeframe, below a target budget, and with our available resources. But if we reactively begin to implement our solution without thinking through the various uncertainties, task sequences, and bases for our cost and time estimates, we’ll soon find that elements we’ve not considered put those expectations at risk. Things take longer to accomplish, cost more than we thought, or we discover there were prerequisites we needed to handle first. How many times have we made repeat trips to the hardware store to pick up items we missed or didn’t think we needed?
The best way to influence the outcome of a project is at the initial stage before we jump into implementation mode. An old facilities engineering adage is that a dollar spent in design saves ten dollars in the field, and that’s a good rule to live by – once implementation (or construction) has begun, it’s typically very expensive, and at least inefficient, to make changes.
Back to General Eisenhower’s observation, that’s not to say that we should never change our plans once we start to implement them – our planning processes should always allow for value-added modifications. But even those late-stage changes that improve a project’s outcome might have been avoided altogether, had we done a more complete planning effort when we first started to visualize the project.