October 16, 2023 Ted Krisher

The Importance of Pre-Planning

“Begin with the end in mind.” This is a familiar phrase to many and is the second of seven habits recommended by Stephen Covey in his popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People®. This was sound advice given to me at the beginning of my career at FTI and is a principle that we practice across the organization. At Excellerate, we know that the success of any project is determined by the amount of pre-planning effort put into it. There are a lot of risks that can be avoided with proper pre-planning.

Advantages of Pre-Planning

Here are some of the advantages of a well-planned project.

Safety. Our first, and most important, core value is an Uncompromised Focus on Keeping People Safe. While diligently pre-planning scopes of work, there are many ways to identify risk. This includes understanding the size and weight of equipment that needs to be moved or installed, identifying the need for specialized tools, equipment or even services, or simply identifying a resource constraint during any given point in the project. It’s critical that all of these things be identified and mitigated to reduce stress and the possibility of causing a safety incident before they even present themselves as risks. In our journey to achieve zero incidents, a strong focus on eliminating risk during the pre-planning stage is very important.

Productivity. Everyone is familiar with and understands the need to be productive. The more productive a project is, the better the outcome for the customer and the organization. By keeping preproduction and engineering activities organized and on schedule, to sourcing and procurement activities and all the other things leading up to a project, our crews have the resources, information and tools they need to execute the scope of work in alignment with the schedule. During thorough pre-planning, we often strategize on how to beat the schedule and budget by looking for ways to be more streamlined and productive. Productivity leads to profitability, which leads to more opportunity.

Opportunity. Another one of our core values is to Redefine What’s Possible. When we pre-plan and execute safely and efficiently, we establish trusting relationships with our clients, increase the right work in our pipeline and become trusted advisors to our important clients. We do all these things, while at the same time creating profitability. When all these things occur in parallel, we create the perfect environment for organizational growth, which opens up opportunities for our team members. Our ground-up growth strategy creates opportunity for our people who put the hard work into making all of these things happen.

Pre-Planning Tools

You may ask yourself, how do I ensure proper pre-planning on my project? There are several tools available, some of which we’ve created at Excellerate, that we use. The most important tool we use is the Production Planner, which defines and manages the timeline of every activity, from engineering to procurement, from production to commissioning and shipping/closeout. Even pre-production tasks, such as submittal activities and information-filing/dissemination activities, are established in the planner to ensure information and data are collected and put in the right hands well before needed. Material receiving loads are managed through the production planner, allowing our receiving teams to plan their material flow activities safely and staff appropriately. And lastly, completion and efficiency data can be pulled from the production planner at any given point during the project to ensure all activities are on track and trending in the right direction.

When we “begin with the end in mind,” we ensure our Excellerate projects are pre-planned thoroughly and accurately to ensure success. What can we execute on for your organization? Contact us today.