Lecture 7 Lego Bridge - Planning exercise

Actually was not expecting to be called upon to give my report in the second session and so was not mentally prepared to give the report.

For me as an observer (a manager is also an observer) - I need to better my skills on summarizing and reporting

What did we learn from the actual planning game?

There is often a subconscious trade off between calculation and intuition where there is a complex situation that requires a reduction in the number of factors in order to make a decision.

Can you plan for every eventuality?
There are cultural issues - There are the two extremes , the difference between Israeli "wing it" culture and the Anglo-Saxon exhaustive planning approach.
Again every plan must include the option for change and need to keep options open and an iterative approach. There are advantages of flexible planning but there are disadvantages of not having even a skeleton plan

What is required is an optimization method a quantitative approach could be the best method to conserve resources

What are the possible failures:
Human fallibility "its good enough" or "we'll wing it" approach
80/20 rule known as Pareto's Principle (this is the most overused ratio ever). 80% of the time spent on the least important issues - yes that sounds about right in my experience.

Where to start with Prioritization
- This reminded me of the 4 quadrants for urgency v importance I recently came across in project management regarding time management

Where there is a gap moving from implementation to rollout
Plan==>Do
I have seen many a project roll out fail because of these gaps in the process. Better thought out design would have saved a lot of headaches later on. I am currently involved with a project at a major Israeli bank which has overrun and where there are gaps in the solution because of a poor design.

Companies came up with the idea of integrated design e.g. Apple and
Boeing - Mismatches solved by concentric engineering.

The more complex the project the more chance of the project being shelved. So more advanced tools are required to keep there being a gap between design and implementation.

Implementation plan - This is the rational of : Who, why, when, how, what.

Evaluation
Last of the 7 stages of the strategic plan
The last steps of Monitor-Control-Mediate

Software companies are fond of providing business tools to assist in all these steps of the Planning process particularly the steps of design onwards . The company I used to work for concentrating on software tools for Monitor and Control