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What is planning?
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 o…f 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. (MORE)
