Page 104 - Budgeting for Managers

Planning and Budgeting a Project
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Visualization: The Oldest Trick in the Book
Many people think that visualization is some New Age fad.The
opposite is true: it’s a foundational tool of American business, first
used over a hundred years ago by Andrew Carnegie, a great industrial-
ist and one of the richest men of his day. He passed his methods on to
Napoleon Hill, whose book, Think and Grow Rich, helped millions of
people in the 1920s begin to use visualization.The business bestseller
of the 1990s still recommends it: Stephen Covey, author of The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People, teaches,“Everything is created twice,
first in the mind.”
Picture it. Plan it. Do it!
respect an expert, use his or her time well. Just ask for a quick
check of your own plan and you may get more help than you
expected!
Grouping the Tasks and Putting the Groups in Order
By adding detailed steps, you’ve already started to create
groups of steps. By asking, “What do you have to do first?”
you’ve begun to put the list in a good order. Now, define the
result of each group of steps: is it clear what you will deliver?
Ask if you have everything you need to start each step. If not,
add or move other steps above that one so that you’ll have
everything you need at the start of each step.

Add Enough Detail
For larger projects, we want to make sure that the smallest
tasks (the ones that are furthest indented on our list) are small
enough to do in a day or two or maybe a week. We might have
a list with three or five indented levels; we want just enough
detail so that we can keep track of things.

Check the List: Key Questions
We want to check our list to make sure we aren’t missing any-
thing. We begin by looking at each step. Is it clear? Is it a verb
followed by a noun? Do we know exactly what we’re doing and
what we’ll deliver?