Waste of time...!

During a recent project between two healthcare organizations,actually two of the biggest and most prestigious ones in Riyadh, we tried to utilize some tools and techniques of PM to raise the possibility of a successful outcome. A charter and a WBS was put, although not a complete or comprehensive ones, but a good start for a project team of which most of the members never used or even heard of PM standards. An activity list was also encouraged, and the team members struggled at beginning to break down the main work packages into activities with timelines and assigned responsibilities to make it easier for tracking and monitoring. One of the suggestions between me and another project savvy was to use Gantt charting to help visualize the progress and schedule the project activities, which was one of the concerns of the steering committee (to kick off the joint operations before dead summer months).When we tried using MS Project, and actually showed everyone how to fill it in simple steps, one of the committee leaders called me and said: "we though PM is supposed to help the project, not waste our time", of course he was talking about the planning phase. There are two folds for his impression, which I totally understand (although disagree with), the first one is that the use of new technology or applications is usually resisted by those who never used it before, or those who are more comfortable with less technology in their work. The second aspect of it is that many people unfortunately think that the time you spend in detailed meticulous planning is actually a waste, and the only time they see you are actually doing something is when you start executing and everybody gets busy performing. Planning is one of the most important stages of any work or project, if not the most important, and in my opinion, the time we take in planning is time well spent as long as it's good and structured planning (people mistake a couple of meeting and emails as good planning).Planning is acually doing something, people may not see a product or a code generated,but this planning is what makes creating that product or developing that code much easier, and faster.In the PM Network published by PMI in March, I read about the story of a marvelous railway project in India, where they had to restructure part of the railway system in only 48 hours, as it was the only time to stop the busy railway traffic in Mumbai without disrupting the city life and business, but they spent one year in planning this event, yes one full year to execute only scheduled 48 hours of hard continuous work, and guess what, it was finished ahead of schedule and the railway returned to function the third day. This much planning was spent in such a short term project, so you would expect months and months of "good" systematic planning to be spent on long term strategic endeavors.