Who said planning is everything

Design and documentation for safety, environmental, and quality are the most common forms of documentation constraints that could affect the success of an activity if they're not in place prior to commencing the activities. With construction being the fluid industry that it is, there will always be situations that arise on a project that require urgent changes to documentation, design, or methods of working.

In such instances, amending the documentation as expediently as possible is vital. However, not having this documentation in place for the activities that aren't subject to late change will be down to poor planning. Maintaining trackers for documentation can help ensure timely production of documentation to prevent delay. Root cause analysis is a technique commonly used in construction, however, it's more often used to determine how health and safety incidents occurred and to ensure reoccurrence is prevented.

Similarly, grouping and analysing failed activities provides project teams with invaluable data that can be used to identify the common reasons that activities are failing to prevent reoccurrence as much as possible to help increase the overall reliability of the plans.

For a plan to be effective, people have to be able to follow the plan. Therefore, adding unnecessarily complicated information should be avoided to prevent confusion. It's also worth remembering that some people who need to be aware of the plan may find the traditional Gantt or bar chart formats confusing, and other formats should be considered.

Other formats that could be considered include visual plans with activities drawn onto site sketches to show the activities planned to occur on a particular day or week. Visual plans are especially successful for site teams, and this format is strongly recommended in such circumstances. Another simple format is a daily list of activities, broken down by location, team, discipline, or a mixture of these to suit the project requirements.

Whichever format is adopted, the most important thing is that a plan should always be clear, concise and as simple as it can be. Email us. Forgotten your password? What is civil engineering? Civil engineering explained What is civil engineering? What do civil engineers do? He told an anecdote about the maps used during U. Maps of the Alsace-Lorraine area of Europe were used during instruction before World War I, but educational reformers decided that the location was not relevant to American forces.

So the maps were switched to a new location within the U. A few years later the military was deployed and fighting in the Alsace-Lorraine: 2. I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. The details of a plan which was designed years in advance are often incorrect, but the planning process demands the thorough exploration of options and contingences.

The knowledge gained during this probing is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as future events unfold. Here is the original German form together with an English translation: 3. No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. A separate Quote Investigator article on this topic is available here.

Possibly, such movements did not enter the original plan; but plans are worthless when the fighting is once begun, and all depends on the inspiration of the moment. In Winston S. Writing a book is not unlike building a house or planning a battle or painting a picture. The technique is different, the materials are different, but the principle is the same. Also in that category are the imaging detector applications to mammography and prostatography.

This base then allows us to conduct a series of major activities. Together, these push the three buttons -- design, build and operate -- that constitute the Large User Facility core capability. That it is large is clear from our international community of 1,, users. Superconducting radiofrequency work is also a major activity as is our work on light sources by the FEL for several customers, especially the Office of Naval Research.

Our goal for the FEL is to generate and support an important science program. We also had an opportunity, in developing the plan, to provide a critique of the challenges or issues associated with our matching departmental performance measures over the next 10 years or so.

A very good interaction took place. The group seemed to think that our story was well constructed and well laid out. There were exchanges in which our associate directors, Larry, Andrew and George, were able to make some important points.