You Plan for 100%

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Unforced Errors Chapter 2: You Plan Assuming Everyone Is Always At 100%

With graduation season upon us and Memorial Day quickly approaching, this is one of the times of year I have to talk with clients to understand who is on vacation and what work we may need to shift or pause to accommodate the upcoming holiday.

The conversations often start with “wow, already,” progress to “thanks for having the foresight to bring this up,” and sometimes end with “does this impact our plan/timeline?” or, at times a bit more aggressively, “how do we make this time up?”

Thankfully, when I plan an engagement, I typically plan for 60%-80%. The answer is usually “this doesn’t impact our timeline because I planned for it.”

You may balk at my planning for only 60%-80%. However, I learned hard lessons and spent late nights in unsustainable conditions early in my consulting career because I (or a partner / whoever sold the work back in my firm days) planned for 100%.

100% leaves no room for error, ambiguity, emergencies, or even vacation!

Back in my firm days, the number 2,080 got stuck in my head. This is the number of billing hours in a year, if you assume a person works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. Assuming a company offers 10 vacation days and 4 weeks of PTO, 2,080 must become 1,840. That 1,840 assumes a person is operating at 100% for the 46 weeks they are working.

When was the last time you ran at 100% all day every day for a year? Never is the correct answer.

If you take a 15% discount, knowing that sometimes a person may not have a great night of sleep or a kid may interrupt because they have an unexpected day off school, that reduces 1,840 to 1,564.

1,564 is 75% of 2,080.

No one should be planning at more than 75%. If you get more than 75%, great! Use it! There’s always more to do!

In my line of work, there is a lot of ambiguity, even with a well-scoped SOW.

• Will I have a difficult client stakeholder who needs extra time from me?

• Is there a whole week off-site the client forgot to tell me about?

• When I dig into the problem, will it be twice as hard to solve as I thought?

I must build for the unknown. I find 60%-80% works very well. In most cases, it gives me space to deliver some extra things or provides the client with some optionality. Even in cases where the 20%-40% is used, the engagement is delivered on time and within budget without me sacrificing my health to do it.

Here are some tactics to support better planning:

• Set clear priorities. Repeat them often.

• 1.5-2x the estimate on how long you think something will take.

• Establish an annual planning cadence if you don’t already have one.

• Debrief after activities and document effort and time needed.

• Encourage time blocking on calendars to ensure priorities get completed and avoid death by meetings.

• Look ahead on the calendar frequently. Auto-add holidays and frequent vacation periods.

I see too many business leaders plan for everyone to be 100% on their game every day of the year. That’s simply not how life works. Plan for lower, give yourself some optionality, and when something major happens – like a pandemic – know that you have built breathing room for everyone. You will not regret it later. I promise.

Unforced Errors is a series highlighting common mistakes leaders and organizations make and offering strategies and tactics to either avoid or recover from the unforced error. These are critiques of how we generally work in the workplace and not criticisms of any single individual or organization.