I have been thinking recently about the various approaches I have taken to planning project throughout my consulting career. Over several blogs, I will describe some of the approaches I have used and know about. Each new project presents its own unique set of conditions and I adapt my various planning tools. The first one I will talk about is one Harvey loved to talk about because it was very simple.
A planning project needs to answer three key questions:
- Where are we now
- Where are we going
- How do we get there
Simple as all that. My friend, June Ross, added two additional questions which I think really help:
- Who is going to get us there
- When
Now isn’t that the neatest little taxonomy of questions which clearly are embodied in every planning project. How about we refer to this methodology as WWHWW. I wish I could pronounce that and then we would truly give this methodology a life of its own.
I think I have used this as a basic framework in many planning projects. We take these basic questions and superimpose some other ideas around the core. More on these other ideas in later blogs.