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By focusing on execution management, many people might question the relevance of planning. Some might ask if planning is a useless exercise. Others might wonder if execution management is always reactive? Both questions miss the point. After all, execution is the critical link between planning and results. Here is a three-fold explanation of their complementary, yet differing, roles.
- Planning is essential for execution – Without project and pipeline plans, you cannot create execution priorities or a baseline to monitor and control execution.
- Business Planning is different from Execution Planning – While there is a feedback loop between execution plans and business plans, business plans are about making business decisions while execution plans are about facilitating day-to-day execution. For example, business planning might be about revenue targets; whereas execution planning would be about getting the projects done in a timely manner.
- The Execution Plans needed for managing execution are different from traditional Tracking Plans – Traditional tracking tends to be about measuring variance to very local targets (like task estimates or task level schedules, such as how many hours will it take to create an engineering drawing). Thus, it is typically geared more towards effort and cost. Managing execution, on the other hand, is about providing execution priorities and early warning signals to managers. For instance, execution plans are useful for deciding which project needs the design crew first, or which suppliers need closer follow up.
And that is the Execution Management Minute for this week! |
