3 Types of Planning Problems and How to Solve Them

Come Wednesday or Thursday, the work is humming, over half of the goals for the week are met. Suddenly, an urgent update from the CEO: your team is to postpone what they’re doing and focus on a top-priority task. This is quite a planning challenge. The team leader has to figure out how to manage this transition, while team members need to readjust on the fly. It takes time and is poised to cause employees to make errors.

If your typical work week looks like this, you are well familiar with problems of planning in an organization. They can be hard to pinpoint as they occur, but you know them once they’re fully manifested. Well, you’re in luck! In this piece, we’re discussing all of the most important management and planning problems, and how KeepSolid Goals helps to solve them. Let’s dive right in!

Problem # 1. Planning and Re-planning Takes Longer Than Tasks Themselves

We’ve all been there: you’ve just spent hours getting all your team’s tasks neatly planned out for the day when suddenly something more urgent comes in from your superiors. Priorities shift and chaos ensues. Instead of simply doing your work, you now have to figure out a number of tactical and strategic challenges.

KeepSolid Goals can’t prevent urgent tasks, but it will help you plan for them. Our app provides you with a solid planning structure and clear visualization of all your objectives, tasks, and deadlines. KeepSolid Goals provides several features to prepare you for planning challenges:

• Оbjective map
• Timeline
• Kanban boards and sprints

Objective map

This feature is great for figuring out on the fly where a new urgent task should fall. Your whole project is conveniently visualized, you see how it branches out into specific sub-goals and departments. And so it becomes clear which objectives correspond to the top-priority task in question, and which teams or individual members to assign. Objective map significantly lowers barriers to effective planning.

Timeline

A timeline works best when the process is clearly sequenced. For example, when a marketing agency creates an ad campaign. The team studies competitors, comes up with an idea, and develops creatives. There are no simultaneous actions - all phases are done one after the other. Such a project is convenient to control via the timeline. You can immediately see at what stage you are, how much work is left, and whether the team is to meet the deadlines at each stage.

Kanban boards and sprints

Kanban boards look like columns for tasks at different stages. This helps avoid the types of planning problems that occur when several separate tasks can be at a few different stages at any given moment. For instance, a sales department would name the columns as stages of the funnel - “First Call”, “Presentation”, and so on. And sprints would add a convenient time frame to tasks that require it.

Kanban boards and sprints allow a manager to quickly track how many potential customers a company has, which clients need a second call, and what and when to tell them. Concurrently, this also adds accountability. Team leaders and top managers can understand what their subordinates are doing and get a detailed picture of their project.

Problem # 2. Employees Have to Multi-Task Across Different Apps

Most employees have to switch across dozens of apps every day. Communicating with customers via email, discussing tasks in Slack, having Zoom meetings, updating stakeholders on the status of their tasks and projects… This creates significant challenges for efficient management and planning. 

KeepSolid Goals solves this type of management problem thanks to integration with 2000+ apps and services. Be it Gmail, Slack, Jira, Google calendar, or other services that you’re using - you can connect KeepSolid Goals to them. And it’s really easy to configure, too! You simply choose an app for integration, create a set of triggers and actions for both apps, and you’re ready to go.

For example, you can connect your Gmail to KeepSolid Goals to have the last to automatically create new tasks as you receive a new corporate email. Or you can integrate KeepSolid Goals with Slack, so that whenever the status of your Objectives and Tasks in our app changes, you get a notification message in Slack. This streamlines your work process and instantly demolishes lots of barriers to effective planning and management.

Problem # 3. Team Members Get Bogged Down in the Minutiae and Burn Out

Both the frontline employees and team managers constantly have to deal with endless routine tasks. These are not too fulfilling, it’s not always clear how they benefit the company as a whole, and their sheer numbers are often enough to overwhelm anyone. Research shows that this type of task causes the bulk of problems of planning in an organization.

This particular strategic challenge is twofold. First of all, it’s easy to lose sight of your organization’s global, overarching objectives if you’re bogged down in the details. This poses problems for strategic planning and objective-oriented management. Second, employees quickly burn out if they feel like their tasks are neverending and generally pointless. This can harm their performance and mental well-being. 

To help you tackle this management challenge, KeepSolid Goals provides all sorts of automatic reports. They help you stay focused on the big picture of the business and quickly get all the necessary information about each project without getting too specific. At the same, you will be able to see the workload of teams and individuals to ensure that no one is overwhelmed with tasks and to prevent burnout. 

Reports cover a wide range of data in broad strokes to assist with your planning and performance monitoring without creating any unnecessary complications. Inside you will find the key basics, like the number of planned and completed tasks or planned VS actual budget, as well as fine details like individual employees’ throughput or teams’ task burnup.