To get anything done, call this execution, we need a plan. In simple cases we might not even notice we’re planning, but we always do. All of life’s this way, all day, every day, if we stop and think about it.
And as we execute to a plan, life happens and we re-evaluate and adjust: we re-plan as needed and continue executing until we either meet our objective or give up. Whether we’re running errands, building a house, fighting a war, or managing a supply chain, the same basic principles apply.
As our objectives become more complex so do our plans. We break our objective down into key steps, considering critical baseline conditions, and include enough detail to ensure feasibility as well as we can. We know things will change, so we include more detail in earlier stages where less change is expected, planning far enough out to see how we’ll ultimately achieve our objectives.
Most every plan requires set of tasks to be done in a sequence. When the sequence is intuitive we may not even think about it, but if there’s some flexibility, and it appears that certain sequences will be much more efficient than others, we’ll likely do some scheduling. We initially plan these tasks at a high level, lumping them into periods where we need them, then as we get closer we include more detail and apply additional skill and logic to determine a good sequence within the context of our plan. This is definitely a kind of planning, but a completely different, more intense kind.
Finally, some tasks require a bit of lead time to prep for, so we “freeze” this initial part of our plans, stabilizing them long enough to protect this setup effort once we get it started. We generally handle minor adjustments during this frozen period as needed, on the fly as we’re working out our plan.
The above concepts are intuitive, and perhaps deceptively simple; it’s what we do naturally every day. But the ideas are extremely powerful when applied in larger contexts. It should come as no surprise then that they comprise the foundation of general planning theory. To be successful in more complex scenarios, where managing all the moving parts at once and seeing how they’re all working together is next to impossible, it’s important to intelligently and consistently apply these same basic principles.
In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at Planning as a unique problem solving domain, consider its purpose and scope and distinguish it from both Scheduling and Execution. Then we’ll follow with similar analyses to complete the total picture, and then summarize what we find. When we’re done, we should have a much better sense of how to tackle our most complex planning challenges.