Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Fortunately, learning that proper planning prevents (piss) poor performance and what it seriously means in your business life, came early for me.

Over the years I’ve been involved in numerous projects ranging from project team member to project lead. During those times, I experienced a range of results from poor execution to outstanding successes. In hindsight, provided you have the correct people and resources, the one thing that I’ve always attributed to the successes was proper planning, always. Without all due consideration and detailed steps in a plan, you could always see why some things got screwed up. And after the fact, the one silver lining was what you learned from the experience. Valuable indeed.

Some Simple Advice

The simple advice for you is to, depending on the event and what’s at stake in terms of value, meaning time, dollars, or even life itself, plan accordingly and with sufficient detail to make sure everything you would like to occur, does occur. Keep it in the back of your mind…proper planning prevents piss poor performance… like a mantra until it’s just second nature. Yeah, OK, call me anal.

In my simplest approach, I always think and try to answer who?, what?, when?, where? and how? Sometimes why? to prioritize and evaluate a step. Then I make checklists.

With much higher stakes I go the project planning route with more elaborate tools like gantt charts. Either way, proper planning will prevent piss poor performance. Sometimes people will say you left this or that out. Often true enough. But sometimes you just have those steps in another plan sequence. It just depends on your own unique style. And since I’m far from perfect, there will be steps left out, but the more you do it the easier and better you get at it, and trust me, any plan is better than no plan at all.

Thanks for stopping by. Dan Lee

Some random thoughts for you…

Words of Wisdom Quotes: “When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.” -  Chinese Proverb