Industrial MRO

The unofficial rule I was trained to follow with the US Fed Gov't was/is:

"There's never enough time to do it right the first time, but there's always enough time to do it over."

That truism hasn't changed in my 40 year career. Doesn't matter if there's paper based planning, computerized planning, or no planning at all.

Hooker

There is a statement that says "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail." If I don't have a plan of what needs to be accomplished how will I know what to work on in and in what particular order? Stephen Covey says, "begin with the end in mind." Work having to be redone is wasted time, effort and resources (which in this economic environment need to be carefully guarded).

Todd Duncan wrote a book called Time Traps, and in it he says "we typically don't have time management problems, we have task management problems." We may be spending time on things that don't matter. If there isn't a strategic plan in place we may be spending resources on wrong things in the wrong order or things that don't need to be done at all for the accomplishment of the "end in mind".

Software systems are simply a tool to use to get the job done. A persons comptetancy with the tool will be the determining factor as to whether it is one more thing to manage, or whether it is a helpful tool. The environment in which the project is being worked on can be a factor as well. If the project team is spread out quite a bit, the advantage of a software system will facilitate communication and not duplication of effort because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.