Planning: The bedrock of project management

On Tuesday 22nd January APM South East Branch held its first joint CPD event with the CIOB Kent Branch in Maidstone, which was very well attended despite the heavy snow, freezing conditions and forecast.

Guy Hindley, a Fellow of the APM, presented an informative insight to the world of planning. The adeptly titled ‘Planning – The bedrock of project management’ went through the value of undertaking effective planning & the foundation to successfully delivering any project. 

Planning is more than a MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) schedule completed by a “whiz kid jockey”, effective planning requires experience, knowledge and soft skills to effectively get the project “buy-in” and adding real value to every project.

The presentation enlightened the audience that the project may “deliver what was asked for” or rather “what was thought had been asked for” and not necessarily what was “intended to be asked for”. Also highlighting the need to understand the objectives and requirements, to breakdown each section into manageable parts and getting down to the right level of detail. The importance of the planner is understanding the project and the awareness of the critical path, dependencies, durations but importantly not assigning any DATES.

The joint venture with the CIOB created good opportunities for networking between the two organisations and several interesting conversations were had, especially inspiring were the two Branch Administrators discussing the quality of the apple pie supplied by the hotel during the pre presentation meal.

All in all a very interesting and well worth attending evening and our thanks to Guy for his time sharing his in depth experience of effective planning.