A Failure to Plan is a Plan to Failure (Borneo Post Friday 9th April 2010)

I recently needed to take a business trip from Kuching to Miri and then on to Brunei and as I needed to call in on a number of clients in both locations I decided this was a great opportunity to undertake the journey by car. As this was the first time I had driven to these places I needed to establish how to get there so I purchased a map of Borneo and after making the appointments decided to plan the route I would take.
Projects are also ‘journeys’ and need a plan if they are to have any hope of being successful. When a project commences it is essential that the scope of work is defined to understand what deliverables are required (appointments) and a project schedule is developed to understand how those deliverables will be produced (the road map).
Projects, by definition, are unique and are never repeated, no matter how similar they were to the last project undertaken.
Take for instance road construction. Sure, the basic method of constructing a road does not change but no two roads are the same and therefore a plan must be developed to ensure it is completed within the given time frame, to the required client specification and within the agreed budget through the efficient use of resources (people, equipment and material).
The adoption of standardised project planning methodologies returns greater benefits than those typically perceived by some organisations evident by the production of a few shaded cells in a spreadsheet and submitted as a project schedule. However,, research does suggests that many organisations only undertake planning to conform with client requirements rather than the inherent value that it returns to the project and business as a whole, remembering that ‘project success equals business success’.
A client once told me they didn’t have time to do any planning as the project was so urgent they needed to ‘just get on with it’. I later learnt that the project completed seven weeks late and wondered how they didn’t have enough time to do any planning but they did manage find an additional seven weeks to complete the project which, cost them dearly in additional indirect costs and liquidated ascertained damages (LAD’s).
Fortunately in Sarawak many contractors do realise these benefits and have implemented methodologies such as ‘critical path method’ (CPM) that determines which activities of work, if delayed, will delay the project completion date (known as the critical path).
The project schedule in most industries is a contractual document that not only shows the project execution timeframe but after baselining, forms a benchmark against which progress is measured. This single document is the result of a concerted effort from the project management team and indicates their capability to perform the work logically, systematically and efficiently.
Planning is about establishing baselines against which progress is measured and involves defining the contractual deliverables, defining and sequencing the activities of work, defining and assigning the required resources, establishing budgeted cost, assigning responsibilities and identifying elements of risk together with their contingency plans.
Think of it this way. If you are planning to get married (yes, getting married is a project) you need to determine what type of ceremony and reception is required (scope) when it will occur and when the individual deliverable milestones are required (time) and how much money should be allocated (cost). You will need to determine who will arrange the ceremony, reception and organise the honeymoon (responsibilities) and what are the contingencies should something not go as planned (risk).
As I mentioned earlier all projects are unique so each wedding must be planned individually and to emphasis this point may I say I have been married twice (to the same person) so you would have thought that these two weddings would have been, at the very least, similar, but nothing was further from the truth. The first one happened in Australia and the second in my wife’s kampong so consider the cultural, social, environmental, legal, logistical and financial differences of these two events and one quickly realises that individual planning was absolutely essential.
Divergences from planned baselines that affect the projects ability to produce contractual deliverables are essential ‘early warning indicators’ that trigger corrective actions. If a project is planned correctly and a baseline applied at the outset then you have established a benchmark to monitor where you should be today and where you are heading tomorrow.
Remember the story about the Cheshire cat in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ where Alice comes upon the cat sitting in a tree at the junction of 3 paths and she asks the cat which path she should take. The cat replies “Well, where would you like to go?” Alice says, “I don’t know.” The cat responds “Then any path will take you there”. Apply that to projects and it is easy to see that a failure to plan is a definite plan to failure.