dealing with change

Fen said:

anyone else on here struggle with change? Especially changes in plans or plans gone wrong, and if you had any tips on how to deal with it?

I got a lot better at dealing with this when I started to plan more. Combined with mindfulness it gives a very solid base to let you plan for a range of reasonably possible changes and backup plans for it it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

For example a while back my employer said to me "we need you to go to the office in Moscow to help with a rollout of IT kit that has gone wrong. The guy in charge has bailed and you need to sort it out and you have to leave in 3 days".

I had 3 days to organise a visa for Russia, book flights and a hotel, plan how to pack (clothes plus work stuff) and get the addresses and transport option for each end of the trip.

I had to brainstorm it - work out all the tasks that needed organising, prioritise them then start working on them, calling in help from my managers secretary to do some of the flight/hotel booking for me.

By dealing with the high priority tasks first (visa) and detailing the other tasks I could get them organised quickly enough and then used my time to work out the steps to actually get there and deal with whatever issues I found. I planne what to do it each step failed and what my escape plan was if it all went wrong and a mob came after me with torches and pitch forks!.

Just writing this all down and trying to think what the dependencies are and consequences help me flesh out a decent plan in a few hours so I can then focus on doing the tasks that this list generates (good old post-it notes are a godsend here).

You get better at it with experience.

In the end it all went smoothly (it turned out Russian customs control had stolen a lot of the internals from the IT kit) and I was able to use the spares I packed to get the network operational and complete the roll out project in 3 days.

The one thing I didn't prepare well for was the weather - it was -19C and I was frozen walking to the office, but as failures go that was one I could live with.

So that is how I prepare - learning project management and risk management was a huge upgrade for me too - you learn what to do to manage different levels of risk - which things to avoid, which to accept and which to mitigate.

Having all that chaos trapped on paper really helps me sleep as I no longer have to keep it all in my head.

[side note] I have loved contingency and emergency-planning, I used to be quite the buff, it’s a horrific-thing when you realise how little contingency actually exists in the UK.. basically if there is an emergency that involves more than 1000 people, the UK is not prepared for it, in the sense that the King’s Peace is uneffected..

[side note] I have loved contingency and emergency-planning, I used to be quite the buff, it’s a horrific-thing when you realise how little contingency actually exists in the UK.. basically if there is an emergency that involves more than 1000 people, the UK is not prepared for it, in the sense that the King’s Peace is uneffected..