Thursday, July 28, 2005

Future Managers Program "Day 6" -- Better Planning for Better Results

Yesterday was one of the satiating days in FMP. It was Shrikala who made the session on “Better Planning for Better Results” so exciting and interesting. When I went in, I saw a lady who was not part of our batch but was running to write something on the sheets. Later on I found out that she was our trainer. In the room there were very few attendees as it was drizzling outside. So we started with a light chat and started waiting for others to come. FMPians started drizzling in and every time we had to ask why were they late and the discussion went on till 9.00. Then we had a formal introduction and she started with the session.

I would put across things which were really good and had some purport for the sessions. She gave a strategic game, which would make us understand the importance of having good plans to get better results. She had drawn a map on the board with squares in it. The sides of the squares represented the roads on the map. It would take 15mins to traverse between the vertexes of the squares. She had marked various locations on the map as client locations. The location would the place, which would fetch the company various projects of different amount. We were divided into three teams and were the sales team who would plan for the day 8am-5pm such that we would make maximum amount. The amount for each project at the corresponding location was specified at the bottom of the map. We planned such that we could get maximum amount and traversed really well. We finished before time and had time to review it also. We had made 7.3Lakhs. The maximum amount, which could be gained, was 7.4Laks. This gave us a clear understanding of how a better planning will help us get better results.

The next topic that we discussed was about the four quadrants. The quadrant represented four things 1. Urgent & Important 2. Not Urgent & important 3. Urgent but not important 4. not Urgent & not important. So we were asked to put things in each of these quadrants. We put lot of things like releases, work we had really an exorbitant lists, which I don’t remember … 2nd quadrant had hobbies, shopping, exercise, shopping etc…which is important but not urgent….3rd quadrant had things like paying bills etc fourth had recreation and others. We discussed about how we put things and don’t prioritize our needs. We procrastinate things and push everything into the first quadrant and make all things very urgent and important. We don’t plan our work and don’t enjoy our life to maximum extent. So push most of our work to the first quadrant and really don’t prioritize our hobbies and socializing. So if plan we could properly learn to things in the 2nd quadrant.

We also watch a video which gave us the idea of how to plan for what ever you do. He also gave the idea of to start with an end in mind. Put all the facts about it and ask questions about the same like when to, where to do and following up the task how it would go. We should never run against the watch but be more toward compass needle. That is being oriented what is our end and going towards it.

So to conclude, it gave us a good idea of how to handle a task in hand by planning for the same.