On the importance of making a plan

“If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there”, as the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland remarks. Without a plan, you are lost.

What is a plan? In essence, it is your best prediction of the future. A plan contains your work (scope), the criteria to determine the work is finished (quality), the estimated time when you expect to finish (schedule), and the projected cost to do the work (budget).

It is a prediction of the future, therefore it will be wrong. Nobody can predict the future. That's why you cannot just create a plan and execute it: you need to update it when new information emerges. Uncertainties will turn into certainties: you will have actual performance as one type of new information, but also unforeseen events that occur provide input to the plan. These updates make your plan less wrong.

It is your best prediction of the future. How good your prediction is, depends on a number of factors: the time horizon you plan for, the complexity of the work, your experience with similar work... These factors determine the level of uncertainty. Your plan should identify the unknowns and make the assumptions explicit. You can then reduce the uncertainty with mitigation actions or by defining a route to validate assumptions and hypotheses.

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”

Benjamin Franklin

Even if your prediction of the future will be wrong, it is crucial to do the exercise. By making a plan, you bring structure to the endless possibilities of reaching your goal, and you can define the optimal route given your constraints. Or to use another quote, from Dwight D. Eisenhower this time:

"Plans Are Worthless, But Planning Is Everything."

Plans are an established element of good management practices. A programme will have a plan that will mainly focus on the intermediate states before reaching the desired end-state of an organisational transformation. Projects have traditionally tried to plan delivery into a lot of detail. But even agile methods, like Scrum, which seems allergic to planning, still have a plan: a sprint has a defined schedule and budget (number of people working for a defined period of time), and tries to predict the scope it will deliver (sprint backlog).

There are two benefits in knowing where you are going, to link back to the cat above. First, it allows you to clearly communicate with your stakeholders. You can manage expectations about what likely will and will not be ready by when. Furthermore, it provides you with a baseline to remain in control. Your plan is your track, and it lets you check whether you are on track. If you are not, you can determine how far you are off track. Because you have thought through the different elements that constitute your plan, it helps to evaluate the options you consider to get back on track.

A plan is a tool that applies to every initiative. The better you get in planning, the more successful your actions will be!