Where I work, I am responsible for analyzing how the documents we create are doing. We post them on our website and I conduct quarterly analyses, sometimes I am happy with the results, but sometimes I am not. I take the analysis and predict how to target market will react to the potential introduction of a new document. If the numbers are looking hopeful, I then provide a “green card” to that type of document to go forward on spending our resources on such documents. With that said, these analyses are not always stable. They can be seasonal; can depend on the economy, and/or what our clients are concerned about that quarter. Being able to forecast the public reaction toward a given document is crucial to our business, so we do not waste time on a project that might not do great when published.

When I was reading an article in Businessweek titled, Hewlett-Packard’s Shares Plunge After Forecast Misses Estimates, I thought of our class and what I do. HP experienced a major plummet in their stock prices because of a shortfall on demand for their services. This happens to every company eventually, but it was a little out of nowhere because analysts’ predicted otherwise. If only they knew how good their tracking signal was, maybe this would have been avoidable.

When should a company know better than trusting numbers? I believe a company should hope for the best, but always be prepared for the worst.

 

The article has been provided for your reference.

When you are new at something, it takes time for you to develop a good comfort level. Before that, one may feel vulnerable to the situation. That is exactly what happened to me. When I first started my internship, I was extremely nervous because it was my first exposure to the real world and my first exposure to an internship itself. I came in with a positive attitude which helped me to take on numerous projects and handling them well. That adrenaline rush helped my performance and my first impression, which I still carry today. About the sixth week into my internship, I got assigned a project that a consultant had on her pending list. Given about 650,000 raw data entries, the executive director and I got together to discuss exactly what was needed of me, or the planning stage demonstrated in class via “the sky is the limit” activity. After taking my notes, I went off to conduct the analysis, and was done within two weeks. Happy with the turnout, I set up a meeting with the director to go over the analysis. To my surprise, she wanted many changes; I would consider this to be the planning stage still even though the project officially started two weeks ago. This went on for four months of changing things according to what she wanted. Finally, during the fifth month of the analysis she was very happy with the analysis and published it to the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).

What does all this have to do with our class? As I stated above the consent change in the analysis was the planning phase even though it took five months to perfect it in director’s eyes. As we saw in class, we all planned how we were going to tackle the requirements the professor had, and then were focused on getting the “tallest” skyscraper. Like my group, we spent barely a minute discussing our plans; the analysis did the same thing. Our team in class planned along the way, and if something did not work, we either added to it or changed our ways. Same thing for the analysis, when the director thought it would be better some other way I was obligated to change it for her contentment.

So I would like to ask, in the context given above, when is planning too much planning?