Planning is Vital, But Knowing the End Product Matters More

Business Daily (Nairobi)

Jenny Luesby

27 June 2011

opinion

Productivity is a subject that is mission-critical in any business. The basket that takes three days to weave and earns only Sh500 is no way out of poverty. Funds will only flow when each basket is a faster project, or if the price of baskets soars.

Yet pricing is a matter over which we have little control. By contrast, there are many ways we can make more with less, with surely the first base being team-work and sharing the process across expert, speedy specialists — right from sourcing to final sale.

Yet recently I witnessed a display of teamwork so poor it has left me scouring the sum for lessons.

As a new endeavour by a business specialised in a different activity, that particular project poured a near three-fold input into a single product, through poor allocation of responsibilities, absent planning, and successive rounds of repetition.

Results discarded

Tasks were distributed only for the results to be discarded; responsibilities were assigned, effected, and then reassigned to be done again; plans were made only to be entirely remade; new ideas were thrown in from scratch at what should have been deadline; and just to add to the joy of this multiple effecting of a single task, no-one had the authority to cut through it all and lead us all out of the chaos. As a time and motion study, it was a Mr Bean take at teamwork, filled with mishap, needless obstacles, and actually painful moments. And it has left me reassessing the projects within my own company for traces that our own fluid planning could be anything as wasteful.

As it is, producing publications is an activity where the only way to produce enough products fast enough is by starting with a plan and distributing the tasks to those who do them — once. We have commissioning editors and writers; we have photographers and layout designers; we have sub-editors to clean-up copy and fit to page, and even managing editors to co-ordinate all.

Even where quality is an issue and work needs to be upgraded, it’s not comprehensive practice to simply discard the whole first take and start with a new person, subject or concept.

However, I realise that any parallels — and the place where that painful project truly stumbled — lies in the mistake of working out what to do by doing it first.

It’s like the writer who sets out on an article with little idea of what they want to say. The fact is that having something to say and writing it down is about 100 times faster than having nothing to say. Thus the horror project was only so fraught because it started weaving that basket, without a clear notion of the basket it wanted to come out the end. It wove a bit, and if the result didn’t look so good, it threw it out, and wove a bit more, differently. It wasn’t a piece of production. It was pure-end trial-and-error learning in a different activity.

And here, I realise, is an issue of vision that is much more basic than the vision that is always talked about. This is not a matter of changing the future, or the shape of a business years down the line, but a simple matter of a clear idea of the final product — clearly communicated.

No wrangles

With that, there are no wrangles inside the team as one person wants it this way, and another wants it that way. The issue becomes only how close what we did came to THE basket.

Which might for many companies be an issue that can be shunted to one side as a matter that’s only essential during product development — if we have our basket designed already, why worry about the risk of huge wasted effort and costs as we all work at creating an undefined basket?

But in our creative businesses, of which there are many in Kenya as the nation rises as a creative hub in Africa, every product requires sight of what it is to be at the end, which will be unique each time, or we shall all make it over and over searching for what we actually want it to be at the outcome.

Planning matters, but knowing the destination matters most of all. Define your end-point, and you’ll get there in a fraction of the time. The key: imagine first, and weave second.

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