Planning Is Important...but the Plan Isn't

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Estimating   Organizational Project Management  

You’ve likely seen a shift in how your organization plans in the last few years. The traditional annual planning process may still occur, but it’s likely to be supported by several additional planning or re-planning sessions that occur throughout the year. Often these are scheduled quarterly, sometimes even more frequently than that. These events are designed to allow for confirmation or adjustment of the planned projects to reflect changes that are happening in the organization’s operating environment.

This shift in planning approach reflects the increasing speed with which changes are occurring beyond our own organizations because of competitors, technology, customer expectations, etc. As those factors accelerate, so we must speed up our ability to adjust—and hence the more frequent planning cycles.

It has been suggested that this acceleration makes planning less important—that plans are only going to have to change anyway, so what’s the point? I don’t agree with that, and I want to explore it in this article. However, I am going to make a key distinction, and that’s between planning and a plan. For this article, here is what I mean by those terms:

• Planning: The process of working collectively to develop a course of action that is intended to achieve a desired outcome. Planning should involve all the stakeholders in …

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