Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Let’s return to basics and discuss the aspects of a plan.

I love it when a plan comes together – that guy on the A-Team TV show

This is one of those blog posts that I am embarrassed to write. Surely everyone already knows this one, right? Wrong.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say,

We need a fill-in-the-blank plan

Sigh. The person saying that rarely understands the concept of a plan, especially a written plan. So, let’s back up and review something that greatly simplifies writing a plan.

A plan answers a simple, three-word question:

whatcha gonna do?

Yogi Berra didn’t say that; I did. And that is all a plan does. It answers that question. A plane states:

Who will do What, When, Where, Why, How, and How much. Hmm, I’ve heard those words before somewhere.

But anyways, that is all there is to it. A plan states what you will (attempt to) do in the future. These little thoughts apply to:

• Project Plan
• Communications Plan
• Resource Management Plan
• Systems Engineering Plan

and so on.

A plan is not a treatise on a topic, especially a well-understood and often covered by a thousand writers of a thousand treatises already written on the topic.

There, I wrote the words. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. In fact, this must be one of the more difficult things to do in the sphere of human endeavor as I rarely meet anyone who understands this.