Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
March/April 2004

Well Planned Is Half-Done

by Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia

This article has been renamed and reprinted from the January issue of the Center for Information–Development Management (CIDM) e-newsletter.

The holiday seasons are already over when you read this article but I still want to give you a gift for Christmas. When the times are tough and we have fewer and fewer resources for doing our work, it is easy to neglect planning and dive in immediately doing “real work.” So my gift to you all is having time to plan.

In Finland, we have a proverb “well planned is half done.” What people often fail to see is that planning is part of the work, not something extra that hardly takes any time. And if the planning is considered part of the work, “well planned is half done” means also that planning should take a considerable amount of time in the total work. Because it is just a proverb, planning might not actually take half of the time, in fact, it might take a lot more than half.

A Plan in Hand

Sometimes planning may sound unnecessary because the activities seem so small that an official plan seems like overkill. However, my advice is that unless you are the only person doing the work and the work is really small, you create some kind of a plan. It does not have to be an elaborate one but it should contain the goal of the activity (and as I noted in my last article, setting a clear goal is very important), subtasks for getting to the goal, and the persons participating in the tasks.

If the project is any bigger, you should include work estimations and more detailed timetables. Thinking about the subtasks usually reveals things you have not thought about initially. Putting the persons and timetables in place serves as a reality check so that you don’t end up in a situation where the deadline is impossible right from the beginning. The plans should naturally be communicated to people who are taking part in the activity.

The Gift of Time

It is actually not in my power to give you time to plan. I hope at least that you take the time to plan yourself. Just writing down some notes about the activities on your notepad will probably reveal some insights that make you see that a more detailed plan is in order. It is so easy to create action plans that state the action in one sentence and have a deadline and the responsible person. Then you assume that the action happens. However, what typically happens is that when the deadline approaches, the responsible person starts calling meetings with people whose time has not been reserved for the actions. These people might not be able to participate or, if they can participate, most of the meeting time is spent explaining what the action is about and discussing whether it should be done at all. The result is typically less than optimal.

My New Year’s resolution is to... Well, they aren’t kept anyway so better not to promise anything. I just wish you all a happy, planning-oriented New Year.

This article is the personal opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.

©2004 by the Center for Information–Development Management. All rights reserved.

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