What Lies Ahead.

Dear Friends

I am in the process of  writing a book, It is related to anticipation of problems that may come when we do a project or business operations.  These problems come in the form of VUCA. ( Volatile, uncertain , Complex and Ambiguous situation) at all level from strategy to operational actions.

I always believe that we do a lot of planning but the execution fails.  One of the main reasons execution fails is we don’t anticipate Risk that will come in future at strategy and tactical level. We think we have made the perfect plan without considering  what all problems will come, and when it actually comes, we get busy in firefighting those rather focus on supporting the team that is doing real execution

Second main reasons are we don’t anticipate how our plan is finally going to be understood by the execution team, it is because we don’t train them, we  don’t empower them.  The real plan which we made at Head Quarter goes for a toss the first time we meet with the enemy, after that it is continuous  change and being flexible with planning decentralized to the operating team   that will also execute it.    We have to train them also to anticipate the problems , change plan accordingly and execute .

In Armed Forces, the plan made  at strategy level  gets translated  to tactical level and finally to the operational level and real actionable steps.    This is what has needed in  the corporate project  also ,  our plan should finally   connect to a blue collar force who is going to execute it and the supervisor who is going to supervise it. 

This book advocates , Rather reacting to an emergency , it is better to plan its prevention or be ready to reduce its collateral damage so that we keep ourselves aligned to originals performance parameters of schedule cost and scope of quality as much as possible.

The planning and execution  revolve around a concept coined by me  R.A.C.E. R stands for rapid delivery, A stand for an absolute scope without any rework, C stands for class quality and E stands for the Economical cost.  It is usually said that we can do a project only with a triple constraint that is sacrificing either of time  , cost, quality , you cannot have a complete scope with everything on time within cost and within quality, something will have to sacrifice. Well this books advocates it is possible to archive all four if you anticipate VUCA issue in advance and prepare for it and manage it in time to curtail its adverse effects

However, the book is  more about forward thinking’  and  preventing  V.U.C.A situation.  I will be discussing a couple of disruptive tools which is practices in Armed Forces and Good Project companies.

  

This book will be for every budding youngster to a senior manager to understand  how either we can disrupt the market by RACE thought the process or get disrupted by smaller new players who have fewer issues and small lean teams to overcome VUCA issues faster .  It is all about saving additional cost to correct a  VUCA issues  later which could have been prevented by little but thinking. That margin is allowing small project companies to make inroads . Let's disrupt other before we get disrupted. 

I will welcome ideas and a title also if need be though I have thought it over for a few days , but still not able to close the cover design and title as I have to share it with my designer also . Side by side completing the book before editing and deciding a  launch date.   45 Min or 1 hour every night  should allow

Ideas from Armed forces how we used to do  planning and execution are welcome and so also from other companies. It will help in making this book useful for next Generation of a project and operational managers and leaders.