Planning

A couple of posts ago, I said that I was going to do some comments on certain topics in Rework and their newest book, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Last time I wrote about their provocative idea that failure is not something to be celebrated and that we don’t learn from failures. I didn’t agree with that philosophy on failure.

Well, today, I disagree with their idea that businesses shouldn’t make plans for the year but I do agree that plans are really guesses. The authors say just do what needs to be done today because you can’t make plans for the changing future. You’ve got to be agile and be able to improvise.

I agree up to a point. But you still need to make plans.

What you don’t want to do is spend months on developing the plan. Many years ago, I used to be involved in budgeting at a refinery and it was practically 7 days a week and maybe 10, 15 hours a day (my memory is hazy on the details but I remember leaving after midnight at least once a week and the other days 7, 8 or 9 o’clock). I can’t remember but we did this over the summer – maybe starting in May and running through August or September. Again, my memory is very faint on this. I just remember people started to get health problems and when the next year rolled around, people were gearing up to revolt if we had to do the same thing.

So, no, that’s not the planning you want to do. It’s a waste of time and health and the plans/budget goes right out the window the next month these days. Back then, the business environment was way more stable. Not today.

I also used to do a lot of forecasting (for shareholders) which is a crapshoot. And, depending on how it’s done, can lead to bad accounting. At one company, the people doing the accounting was also doing the forecasting – and there were tremendous pressures to meet the forecast, again to please the shareholders. What was supposed to be a quarterly exercise became a monthly ordeal. Guess what happens when forecasters/accountants are placed under great pressure to make accurate forecasts? They start to do bad accounting, especially on the revenue side. I think I might have accidentally seen 3 instances of bad accounting. Eventually the company imploded due to massive crooked accounting. Fortunately, by then, I had already left the company.

At another company, the forecasting and the accounting was done by two different people and that was a much better situation to work under. The pressure was more on the operations side rather than on the financial engineering because you have to drive the sales and operations business to get the business results you need.

But the forecasting did not get better because they were still guesses. At heart, forecasts and plans are guesses.

At this company we did rolling forecasts and during one of those rolling forecasts, we would forecast an extra 12 to 18 months to kind of develop the plan. But we did not spend a lot of time on them – maybe one or two weeks. In the tech world, business just change dramatically so you can’t predict a year in advance what the environment will be. You can make guesses but that’s all it is.

But you still have to make these plans, even if they are inaccurate, because they help management formulate their objectives in order to keep moving forward, to keep improving the business. They help management decide which way they want to go, given their limited resources.

However, giving those shareholders the quarterly forecast should really just go away because they are all guesses and shareholders have unrealistic expectations.