Imminent Departure Series: Excessive Planning
This is the second post in the Imminent Departure Series, my final thoughts about what I think colleges do wrong in their day-to-day operations. This is my last-ditch attempt to effect change while I still work for a college full time. Read other posts in the series here.
After yesterday’s post on running effective meetings, my friend Rick Allen made the following comment:
From my experience, follow-through is the greatest problem. You need to have action items by the end of the meeting and someone needs to follow-up on them.
I couldn’t agree more. You can have all the meetings/planning sessions/retreats that you want but if the execution and follow through is not there, then all you’ve done is waste a crap-ton of time.
This dawned on me the other day: Want to know the quickest way to tell if someone is inexperienced in online marketing? Look at how much time they spend planning, relative to the amount of time they spend executing. When you have experience, you know what’s out there, what types of tactics work for different goals, and are usually able to assess a situation quickly and offer advice for moving forward. Inexperienced people can’t do that, and will oftentimes use the need to plan and strategize as an excuse to bring themselves up to speed. Being inexperienced is not an inherently bad thing if you acknowledge it (i.e. “I’ve never done something like this before and want to do a bit of research on it”).
Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for planning and strategizing…but ultimately if you don’t ever get to the execution stage, you’ve missed the point. The ROI on planning without execution is zero.
The moral of the story? Hire experienced people who are action driven to do this stuff. You’re much less likely to get bogged down in the excessive planning.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you read here? Subscribe to this blog through RSS or sign up to receive email updates when new content is posted.
Hire Karlyn: Karlyn is the President & Principal Consultant of DoJo Web Strategy, a consultancy dedicated to helping colleges and universities to utilize the web in their marketing efforts. Find out how she can help your institution by requesting a proposal today »
July 30th, 2009
What is this ‘execution stage’ you speak of? This is a strange and foreign concept to us. Are you trying to say that endless meetings aren’t an end in and of themselves? You mean there is more that we’re supposed to do? Maybe this is our problem.
July 30th, 2009
Absolutely you must have action items and follow through. One of my favorite ways to end a meeting is “okay so this is what we’re going to do” and just do a quick re-cap of action-take-aways.
If it’s a meeting *I* am managing, I followup at the end of the day, or maybe end of the week with an email listing out what everyone agreed to do, how far they’ve progressed, and who needs to help in order for everyone to complete the tasks at hand.
There’s nothing better than walking away from a meeting with a plan of action and feeling like you not only accomplished something, but are on your way to reaching a goal.
Great post!