Planning Personnel: Why Can’t We Just Play The Game, Coach?
What happens on “Game Day?”
You’ve practiced till you’re blue in the face, right? You’ve watched the tapes of your previous performances. You’ve endured hours of chalkboard sessions, with your coaches reviewing every strategy in the game plan. You’ve scouted the opposition. You’ve mobilized your planning personnel. You’ve even heard the pep talk.
OK, we’ve carried the sports metaphors to an extreme in this space before. Blame it on Title IX if you wish. But the parallels really are instructive because they echo the importance of the everyday things we know we have to do – things that are vitally important, but often taken for granted.
Look at what happens before a single football game is played: months spent researching draft picks and human resource acquisitions (trades and free agents, sometimes even management changes). Half a dozen mini-camps. A month of training camps in blistering weather conditions to “stress the system.” A bunch of annoying, sometimes costly pre-season games.
Why? Because when millions of dollars and hundreds of careers are at stake, you can’t afford to send the team in to play before they are fully prepared.
“Organizations that start restoring customers without a clear understanding of the event will spend more money and waste more resources trying to play catch-up after they realize how large the scope is.”
Every team needs to have qualified planning personnel that can handle the roles and responsibilities to make each restoration event successful. There must be replacements identified in advance, trained and ready to assume their roles before jumping in and starting the storm planning process.
Whether you’re in the NFL or the MRL (Major Restoration League), operations and planning personnel must be flexible enough to change the plan quickly in order to be timely and cost effective in restoring customers. To be recognized as a successful company with outstanding restoration numbers, you must have a plan, and a team that will develop, modify and implement the plan when you have that potential crisis in the making.
