After having almost completed school (2 weeks, booya!), after taking Project Management in particular, and most importantly having dealt with it personally in the professional world, I’m seeing the necessity of proper planning and foresight on major projects, otherwise the results can be disasterous, and in some cases catastrophic. I mean you can hear that over and over, but when you experience the catastrophe yourself, it takes on a whole new meaning. Within the IT field, end-users become accustomed to using applications, websites, and certain functions on a daily basis. They just want it to work, and they don’t want it to change. It’s hard enough for many end-users that aren’t computer-savvy to begin with to remember where to go and what to do, but then changing the things they do know makes it even worse for them. And when you take the rug out from under them by introducing a new system, upgrade, or “improvement” to a smoothly functioning application or system, it really rocks their world. This is where proper planning comes into play. It’s really a very basic, fundamental concept that should be employed within a professional corporate environment that seems to go overlooked many times. If you get a system that works fine, I say stick with it, unless there are major security holes. But if you do have to upgrade to a newer system or application, try with the best of your ability to make the changeover seamless, otherwise you throw your end-users for a loop. Within a corporate environment, it can mean the difference between gaining or losing net profit. It can also mean the difference in your total operating costs increasing or decreasing for either having to repair all the screw-ups in the system due to improper planning and getting other people involved that shouldn’t be initially, or spending that extra time you might use repairing broken links with planning out your project at the very beginning. That’s my rant for the day …