What is planning?

Answer 1

Planned obsolescence (also built-in obsolescence (UK)) is the decision on the part of a manufacturer to produce a consumer product that will become obsolete and/or non-functional in a defined time frame. Planned obsolescence has potential benefits for a producer in that it means a consumer cannot just buy a product once and never have to buy again - the life of the product's usefulness or functionality is fixed, so that at some point the consumer must purchase again, whether returning to the original manufacturer for a newer model, or buying from the competition. For an industry, it stimulates demand in the marketplace by ensuring a customer must come back into a buying mode sooner than had the product been built to last longer or indefinitely. It exists in many different products from vehicles to lightbulbs, from buildings to software. There is, however, the potential backlash of consumers that become aware of such obsolescence; such consumers can shed their loyalty and buy from a company that caters to their desire for a more durable product. Planned obsolescence was first developed in the 1920s and 1930s when mass production had opened every minute aspect of the production process to exacting analysis. Estimates of planned obsolescence can influence a company's decisions about product engineering. Therefore the company can use the least expensive components that satisfy product lifetime projections. Such decisions are part of a broader discipline known as value engineering.

Answer 2

Standing plans are plans that are in place. These are the plans a business is trying to execute at the current time.

Answer 3

Planning is the very complicated method and procedure of us trying to approximate the time and cost of a series of activities (often referred to as 'Estimating') using a set of pre-defined resources, that are then scheduled into a series of logical activities based upon their dependencies, the requirements, outcomes and availability of the resources (often referred to as 'Scheduling' and 'Resource Management'), and the turning this data into an estimation of cost (often by using Budgeting & Cost Management techniques) that includes some level of contingency (often called the 'risk bucket') that has taken into account activity risks and opportunities of future events that may affect the outcome of those activities, which is then all summarised and written down so that it can be assessed by a Stakeholder Community that evaluate the likely success and benefits of the proposal or variants of it (various costed options) on the whole venture, based upon their previous collective experiences, their intuition, feelings and wild-ass guesses, to ultimately come up with a costed value that is then often passed some other unfortunate person to actually implement and deliver in a whole unrealistic timescale, using often totally inappropriate or non existent resources. Is it any wonder that pseudo-science of planning and real world delivery never quite meet up, when we try to predict the future, when any number of uncertain events or sets of circumstances often transpire to frustrate us and have a detrimental effect on the achievements of the stated objectives, considering we are physically biologically wired to 'think positively' and delude ourselves that everything will follow a predetermined manner that we have thought through in our mind, even though we daily experience and see with our own eyes, that everything that will go wrong, does go wrong. It is a true miracle that we achieve anything at all under these circumstances.