Dwight Was Right: Plans Are Useless

  Communications Management   Estimating   ProjectsAtWork  

Elaborating on Dwight Eisenhower's often quoted declaration, a project plan that exists in a vacuum is useless, but active, collaborative planning is indispensable. Here are three keys to injecting a collaborative mindset into your project environment, from decision-making to execution.

In management circles, the General Dwight D. Eisenhower quote “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable,” is often heard. At first, the quote might seem to be a contradiction, but when put under the lens of execution, there’s a lot of truth there.  

Just think about your last project and how many weeks or months were spent planning the strategy, business case and project management approach. 

In large bureaucratic organizations, the project planning phase can extend for months without yielding a single deliverable with business value. In smaller organizations, chaos reigns as project teams work on multiple projects without a clear understanding of competing resources requests and dependencies. 

Strategic planning can be applied to help with these issues, but the real results are found in project execution. The following quote from an article on the Sticky Branding blog links the importance of execution with planning:

“Plans are just plans until you implement them. Your success is directly linked to how well you …

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