Planning

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Essence

Being a proficient planner begins with clear objective-setting and thorough scope definition. Stakeholder involvement and early engagement help gather crucial requirements, while effective risk assessment and mitigation strategies address potential challenges. Efficient resource allocation, realistic timelines, and robust budget management contribute to a well-structured plan. Skilled communication planning, quality assurance integration, and adaptability to changes further enhance the planning process. Collaboration, team building, and leveraging technology are integral for successful execution. Continuous monitoring, documentation, and alignment with organisational strategy ensure that plans remain effective and adaptive. Lessons learned sessions contribute to ongoing improvements, emphasising a commitment to excellence in planning.

Successful planners also prioritise stakeholder communication, fostering a transparent and collaborative environment. They ensure that the team is well-equipped with the necessary skills through recruitment or training initiatives. By consistently applying these factors, a skilled manager sets the foundation for successful project outcomes, aligning plans with organisational objectives and driving continuous improvement.

Experience

Planning is a crucial component on all programs and takes place at many levels. A fully integrated plan that details the tasks for the team with a roll-up for program management is an unachievable nirvana, but still it is often demanded sometimes from the most senior stakeholders. It's certainly important to have placeholders at the very highest level, but it's also important to stress that plans based on unknowns are fairly meaningless. Often the financial processes demand it and will try to lock scope, time and cost all up-front. The skill then is managing expectations. An alternative is to encourage finance to consider lean budgets with shorter horizons and guardrails, rather than tie the organisation into a long term financial commitment.

PRINCE2 taught me product based planning and I've employed this approach to outline the main components of delivery. At Macquarie for example, we had to build a data warehouse for their white label credit card offering. Rather than go to the team and ask them what they thought the steps were, I instead asked then to think about it hierarchically in terms of deliverables - starting at the highest level of a full featured, fully functioning, supported data warehouse. Breaking that down into component deliverables was strange to a very hands-on team that wanted to talk about what programs to write, but it was necessary. The leaves of the hierarchy were then re-arranged - using post-it notes - so that dependencies could be identified. This produced a more comprehensive plan, and once estimates were attached, the critical path could be identified. I still use this approach, even recently at Greencross, as it typically identifies more elements of the plan.Even on agile projects, a top level breakdown of components and identification of the critical path is extremely useful to inform the prioritisation work of the product owner.

Detailed planning should be done just in time when as much information is available as possible. When I worked on the pet insurance project this detail would be done in sprint planning. On larger programs there should be a coordinate planning session (PI Planning) bringing together all the agile teams to work through a plan for the next few months (typically 12 weeks.) At Rabobank we held such sessions and created a planning board of the features and drew the dependencies between the teams. The next couple of sprints could be planned in some detail, but shorter follow up sessions would occur between sprints to continually add detail to plan as more facts were uncovered.

Effective planning is a dynamic process that requires a combination of strategic thinking, collaboration, and adaptability to navigate the complexities of today's environments. It's also an iterative process that improves over time. I always incorporate a feedback loop, or retrospective, to ensure the team learn how to improve their estimates and the planning process.

Credentials