Planning forward and backward—The High Performance Igniter?

The High Performance Igniter? is a brief perspective on what I’m seeing in the market, topics of interest for leaders and resources and tidbits to help you with your business. Here’s my take for September 18, 2024.

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Things I’ve been thinking about

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Time, money, quality

Pick two

The first time I heard that saying many years ago, I had to think about it.

But in the time since, I don’t think I’ve found a case where it isn’t true.

You can have it fast and high quality, but you’ll need to pay more for it.

Or, you can have it fast and cheap, but the quality won’t be high.

It takes investment to be fast or high quality, which means you either have high volume or high quality.

As much as we all know this framework, either specifically or intuitively, it seems to go out the window when we think about projects.

A goal is set that x needs to be delivered by y date.

But what does it take to get there?

Back in my construction days, we looked at the critical path.

The one pathway that is the longest and if that piece doesn’t hit the timeline, the whole project will miss the delivery date.

Planning forward, all the steps should be laid out, with the critical path identified and that will give you the completion date.

But that date might be longer than desired.?

That’s when options need to be considered to move faster.

Which often means paying more to expedite.

Too often, this process doesn’t take place and people scramble at the end, resulting in higher cost or lower quality to make the deadline.

And many times, the deadline is arbitrary and could be moved so cost and quality don’t suffer.

These are all choices.

And they start with planning forward and backward to decide which combination of time, money and quality are right for the situation.

Then managing along the way to get the expected results.

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To your growth and success,

Heidi

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