PLANNING

After so many things not going to plan during my group project at university I realised how important planning is to anything as well as the importance to sticking to it. It took me back to schools days, back to when I was learning business studies by my legendary business teacher Ms Ballantyne. She taught us the S.M.A.R.T ways to do things in business but essentially it can be applied to anything.

Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Target is the foundations to succeeding in what you want to do well or achieve it.

SMART: has many meanings but in the personally helpful sense here we’re on about the plan being intellectually right and that it makes sense and also to have a point or more reason of actually doing what your planning to do. There’s no point in a company planning to make something that is going to cost more to make then its going to make when sold, unless its for an unprofitable gain.

MEASURABLE: how long is it ideally going to take, can you figure it out and give your self a time scale and stick to it? Do you have any leeway or extra time if something goes wrong or for improvement? If a gaming company went to far over the deadline it could be a case of they don’t have the money to stretch their time scale and risk going bankrupt because they don’t have the income they forecasted from the game that was meant to be released 3 months ago.

ACHIEVABLE: can you actually get it done? Do you have the time and the man power to get the job your setting done? You shouldn’t over estimate something or you can end up having a passive negative effect on all your other plans. First thing we did in the group project was to try and set an achievable sized area for us to do.

REALISTIC: is it something that can even be done, we humans have a great imagination, its been one of our greatest assets to help us develop over the centuries but we still need to be able to tell what’s a good idea from what’s complete madness at the time and era. Otherwise a way of looking at it is do you have the necessary skills and equipment to do your task… a farmer is hardly going to build a NASA space rocket for instance.

TARGET: what is your overall outcome of the plan you are inputting, what must be met in order to finish. Effectively your list of things to do.

From the start of summer I’m planning my own SMART plan to help me achieve more in my yearning to learn and do more for my course as the past to years have seen me do a rather minimal amount due to the lack of a smart plan, so implementing one over summer and setting it right for year 3 will mean I’ll get what I should be doing done if not more. Effectively they’ll be a branch of SMART plans, the major one for the year and the various smaller ones that I’ll make for each individual project.