Planning

PLANNING

Introduction

Planning is one of the most important project management and time management techniques. Planning is preparing a sequence of action steps to achieve some specific goal. If you do it effectively, you can reduce much the necessary time and effort of achieving the goal.

A plan is like a map. When following a plan, you can always see how much you have progressed towards your project goal and how far you are from your destination.

One more reason why you need planning is again the 80/20 Rule. It is well established that for unstructured activities 80 percent of the effort give less than 20 percent of the valuable outcome. It is much easier to adjust your plan to avoid or smoothen a coming crisis, rather than to deal with the crisis when it comes unexpected.

Pre Requisite Discussion

The students should be renowned with the expectations of the outcome, the procedure to be followed, the budget requirements to be analyzed and the discussions on location about the work to be done.

Definition

According to Koontz O'Donnel - "Planning is an intellectual process, the conscious determination of courses of action, the basing of decisions on purpose, acts and considered estimates".