My good friend and I are coaching a girls’ basketball team for our kids. We are both rookies. I assistant coached last year. One thing I learned…if you don’t have a plan, the kids eat you alive. The parents give you that look of disappointment. You go home weathered and battered and resolve yourself to be better prepared next week.

Tonight we got together for an hour. Put together what we wanted to talk to the parents about and then a step by step plan for practice. I feel good about going in tomorrow night, confident. I know there will be curve balls, chaos and stress. But we have a plan, something to swim back to and hang on. Catch our breath. Regroup.

When it comes to IT, having no 3 year plan is pretty close to walking into a gym with ten, 9-12 year olds with no practice plan or anything. You are reacting. You are not in charge.

Kids are like staff that does whatever they want, and parents, are the supervisors and managers that talk about how you don’t know what the heck you are doing, and have no direction.

Running a successful business is parallel to running any organization or team for that matter. Preparation. Planning. Forecasting.

Lifecycle and budget. It really needs to be a cost of doing business. Like rent. Salaries. Office furniture.

Sure, many people get away on a song. But many times they are the ones who end up chasing after major problems at inopportune times and have customers sitting on hold as a customer service rep waits for their information to “pull up”.

Even if you have almost no budget for IT, get a plan. Where and when will you spend it? How old is your equipment. Is every purchase a surprise?

Like tomorrow night for my friend and I, sure I’m nervous, but at least we have some kind of a plan before it all turns to chaos. Sounds a lot like IT huh?

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs