PLANNING

Planning, i believe is something which every person has done some stage in their life. In relation to a group collaboration, it should be one of the first things that should be done to ensure the outcome of the work would be up to expectations once it’s finished.

Ways of planning can be just writing down notes on what is needed to be done, this is also used in diaries or calendar, notes written under the expected date of completion. There are many programs on the web nowadays that allows you to enter a milestone or to-do lists, once the certain milestone or work is achieved, it would automatically alert you that the thing is due today for example or you may tick it off the list to show as completed.

Planning means a scheme of arrangement, a method of acting, proceeding, doing, making, etc developed in advance. Planning is preparing a sequence of action steps to achieve some specific goal. If done effectively, it can reduce time and effort in achieving the goal. How would it reduce time and effort can be explained by a simply example where you have a set date where the work is meant to be done, maybe a few weeks away from actual hand over of the work. After having the work done, it leaves the next few weeks for and testing or checking and even adding changes if needed. When this is not planned, work may be rushed or left till very late and therefore leave little time to fix up and problems. Later on, any problems found by the client, it would bring you team a bad reputation, cost your team extra or may even have to pay for the loss.

References:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/planning
http://www.time-management-guide.com/planning.html