It’s all in the Planning.
How many times have you heard that line. Planning is important and we all need to be doing it. But what kind of planning is needed? With Ed Tech, you need to plan the roll out of software and hardware.
IT Leaders should always be planning. Short term and long term planning. Planning their days and weeks and months. Mapping out what they need to do today, tomorrow and next week. No one is thinking more about technology than the IT Leader and they should be thinking and planning more than anyone.
IT Leaders make plans that are detailed enough to create actions, but not overly detailed as to take up too much time in the planning phase. Do not get bogged down over planning everything. Plan enough so that everyone (or just you if you are doing something alone) can see and think about what will happen and what might happen.
Plan on planning. Even if you think you know exactly what to do. Stop and think about what you are going to do. Do you need to gather information, tools, software, etc. Rather than run all over the place when you are half way through a project, think about it before hand.
Plan for the best. Making your plans with the best ideas you can come up with is great. If you have been down the road with technology you will be better at knowing what might be expected. If you have not done planning in an area you are called on to provide leadership, get some input from others.
Prep for the worst. Make sure you think through a few “what if” scenarios. You know that everything will not go as planned. Take a little time to think of a backup plan and a way to back out if things end up not working. Planning for how to get back to a previous state will enable you to move confidently forward.
Pause the Planning. Stop and think before starting final execution. Just a short pause of 5% of your execution time can yield wonderful things. So if your action plan will take 8 hours to complete. Take an additional 30 minutes or so just prior to starting and review the plan again. I have avoided some major road blocks by doing this.
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