Yesterday Lesson - About planning

Yesterday when I was supporting Denso project at Bangi, suddenly IT manager Mr. Ng came in to the server room and have a short chat with me. Then we talk about VMWare, about his success case and his future plan and blah blah blah. The only thing that really enlighten me is about his planning strategy.

We all know that planning is important, just like Mr. Ng and others said if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. Is really true, even though we all know this truth , but not many of us really plan out our stuff. As time goes by, our planning are usually all inside the mind, or so call ad hoc planning which equals to no planning at all. Some people realize this truth and also following the planning method, they really do planning. But they are planning for what they are going to do. Just like we have yearly plan, quarterly plan and so on. The plan is to plan what we are going to do. But one thing Mr. Ng has really taught me is you have to plan for the change in the next 5 years.

Talking about IT perspective and technological advancement, such as CPU processor, software, and OS, they have trend, and also changes every 3 or 5 years. Due to this nature,Mr. Ng has to plan ahead what to change and how to change. As he mentions, Denso even though is a MNC, but then their budget is not big though. So he plans ahead very well. As just now discussion with my "brothers" lee lee, she told me people who really has great wisdom can plan ahead and plan for changes, and plan ahead like 3 or 5 years and forecast the change.

But I think is not that true, consider planning for changes is like advance planning, thus we have to master the basic planning first. Since many of us never really conduct basic planning, we cannot achieve the level of advance planning. As Mr. NG current age and his expertise in IT for 20 years experience, he has been practicing planning may be for at least 20 years, thus in order to achieve advance planning level is easy for him. Plan for changes is more like planning for dynamic, fluctuating demand and supplies in production. So all of us should start with some basic planning today, so that one day we can achieve the advance planning level like Mr. Ng and contribute to the orgnization and also society.