Planning is critical to success. By planning you prepare yourself for future tasks and by being prepared you put yourself in the position to succeed. However, if you don't plan your objectives and tasks appropriately, you could have failed before you even begin!
There are five critical steps in the planning process. Throughout this activity, my group definitely took all of them into account. However, even though we did take them into account, we did a poor job cooperating with one another which ultimately resulted in FAILURE!
Step 1: Define your goals and objectives...
- This step was easy to follow as the goals, objectives, and constraints were directly presented to us. Nonetheless, we succeeded 100% here.
Step 2: Determine current status compared to objectives
- We all knew our resources however we never took into account our strengths and weaknesses. It certainly would have helped had we delegated a leader because six people presenting their ideas in a free for all was extremely disorienting. However, this was probably tough to do for everyone due to the excitement and time constraints. I think we performed at about 20% in this step.
Step 3: Develop premises and several alternative strategies
- With so many ideas being thrown around, we definitely had at least several strategies. As people shared their ideas, we also discussed the strengths and weaknesses of them which is how we were able to choose a single strategy. I would say we performed 75% in this step because while we performed what is necessary in this step, we did it in a extremely disorganized fashion.
Step 4: Analyze alternatives and make a tactical plan
- We analyzed alternatives and came up with our final strategy. We discussed tactics such as how are we going to get the scissors, how we are going to build the contraption, however we did not allocate jobs and resources. Had we allocated jobs and resources, when it came time to build we would not have ended up fighting for the egg! WHICH WE DID! For this step we performed only 10% because allocating jobs and resources is critical to being organized and without the organization, when it came time to build, my team fell apart.
Step 5: Implement the plan and evaluate results
- Here we performed 100%. We did exactly what we had to do and even made adjustments to our planned strategy. However, because of our failure to meet all the requirements in step 4, our implementation in step 5 suffered. When the time was up, we rushed and panicked and as a result broke our egg before getting a chance at the 10 points extra credit!
This really was an exciting activity. I learned so much regarding planning and working with others. Even though we didn't even get a chance to step up to the plate, at least we had fun!
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