Planning Guidelines

Few companies spend adequate time in planning and designing their technology systems (or for that matter other important systems in the organization).  Most also tend to shortchange pre-production testing.  It is common to focus the large majority of project time on configuring networks, writing code, and other easily identifiable deliverables in an attempt to save time and money.  However, every hour spent in planning and design typically saves several in development and every hour spent testing typically saves several in implementation and fixing post-production problems.  In a well designed project you will typically spend roughly equal amounts of time on:

• planning and design
• development and configuration
• testing, documentation, and implementation

Spending the necessary time on planning and design up front will expedite completion of the system far better than an overly-aggressive project schedule.  The desire to start making progress on development tasks and acquiring the necessary resources must be controlled until a complete initial system design (which is not necessarily the final idealized design) is available.  A complete plan must:

• clearly define the needs and priorities of the business.
• contain a well defined design of the system.
• provide the direction needed to realize the design.

While there are many methods of planning which differ in detail, almost all of them have one very important thing in common:  they are focused on how to get from where you are now to where you want to be.  This means that you must consider every possible alternative in choosing the best path to get there, which makes planning much more complex.  It also makes it difficult to clearly define your ultimate long term goal due to having to allow for a geometrically increasing number of possibilities as you plan farther into the future. 

To avoid these problems, we use a method of interactive planning which coordinates people and activities in a way that makes full use of their talents and knowledge.  In interactive planning the stakeholders of a system meet in small, coordinated groups to design the system and define the policies and procedures that will be necessary to implement and support that design.  Using a technique known as idealized design, each group defines the system, or the parts of it that apply to them, as they would like it to be if there were no constraints.  A member of each group meets with a selected member from each of the other groups to ensure that the designs produced by all groups are compatible. 

Once the ideal design is in place, the groups plan backwards to the current state of the system or organization to determine the steps needed to reach the ideal design.  This results in fewer possibilities to consider during planning because the groups are looking at potential paths between two fixed states (the ideal design and the current state) rather than between a fixed, current state and a variable one (the unpredictable future).

The differences between interactive planning / idealized design and most other forms of planning / design seem trivial at first glance, but in practice they greatly increase the productivity of the planning and design process because:

• All stakeholders provide input into the system design, not just management.  The design therefore accounts for things that would never occur to management because they are not part of management's duties and responsibilities.
• The time to develop and implement a system is reduced and its chances for success are greatly improved because all stakeholders were involved in its design and are therefore very likely to support it and work hard to make it succeed.
• Interactive planning focuses on the development of an organization or system rather than its growth.  Development is the process of increasing your ability to make the best use of available resources whereas growth is the process of gaining control over more resources.  Therefore growth is limited by available resources whereas development is limited only by creativity and imagination.  A well developed organization, because it is more efficient, will find it easier to survive hard times and take advantage of good times than one that is simply large.

If you would like to learn more about planning and design we encourage you to read "Recreating the Corporation - a Design of Organizations for the 21st Century" and other books written by Dr. Russell Ackoff.  Also please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have about planning and design.