Take this simple chart to show effectiveness:

What we’re seeing here is a nice curve going steadily downhill. It doesn’t matter what you actually implement at the end of Time, if you don’t do your planning up front, you’re screwed – and quickly!

A lot of people think that its another string to their bow if they can react quickly and act tactically… That’s fine for a short while, but at some point, people are going to start to ask, “actually, why is this person always acting at the last minute?”. It’s a good skill to have – not necessarily a good skill to use over and over.

Sure, you have to react sometimes – if an incident happens, there was likely no foresight that it was going to happen, otherwise you would have prevented it beforehand. However, although you cannot plan for these things upfront, imagine the Time ticker in our chart above starting when an incident happens. As time goes by you start to lose your effectiveness, the business are starting to lose their patience, and before you know it you’re on a downhill slope to doom.

I guess the message of this post seems obvious enough to most, however I am yet to see it put into real action, which leads me to believe that a lot of organisations aren’t doing enough of it. Plan early, deliver on time and if you need to react, make sure you have planned how to react – and quickly. More importantly… Effectively!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 and is filed under Effectiveness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.