My latest blog post for IPRO’s blog discusses a phrase that may seem odd to some of you: “planning to manage”. It makes more sense if you understand not all management is the same.
I once met a professional in our industry who said he was a great crisis manager and I asked what made them so great at it. His reply? First, you need a crisis!
You can’t always avoid a crisis, but, while it’s admirable to be able to keep a clear head in a crisis, the best crisis management is avoiding the crisis in the first place. Planning helps you minimize the potential of encountering a crisis in your projects. That’s why Planning is (by far) the most important of the Five Process Management Groups from the Project Management Institute (PMI), with 21 of the 39 processes across all five groups. For those of you who are math challenged, that’s more than the other four process groups combined.
So, what is “planning to manage” and why is it different from the Planning process group? What does that have to do with technology? And why will I have more to say about this next week? You can find out on IPRO’s blog here. It’s just one extra click! 😉
So, what do you think? Have you ever heard the team “planning to manage” before? I hope not, because I coined the phrase! Maybe I should trademark it? 😀 Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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Excellent as always, Doug. A quick example: I recently began a new phase in my career as IG Manager for a company; one of my 1st acts as a “newbie” was to identify low-hanging fruit for a quick win. It turned out to be getting contract mgmt. software for the Contracts group. IT informed me of their process for getting new software, a new set of processes to me. But I found out I was listening correctly – me…the constant soapbox screamer about communicating and listening! What they really said was this is our process from the IT side for ALL new software projects.
I focused on the “do this now” mental state, not the change management state; in other words, not preparing myself to do what will be needed in the future, and not keeping a ‘weather eye’ on that future. I’m now preparing for another software proposal for Legal Hold, hopefully for completion soon, and another large implementation of Document Management software that I know we can’t do until next year. But I will have my IT requirement ducks in a row…and will be communicating steadily with my IT group. Planning to manage…who’da thunk it?!
Great story and wonderful example of what I was writing about, Aaron! Thanks for sharing it!