Rough planning

Rough planning is high-level, long-term planning that serves as a preliminary stage to detailed planning. In rough planning, resources and activities are planned within a larger time frame, but without all the details. You could say it is preliminary planning with a rough brushstroke before the fine-tuning takes place.

Rough planning is characterized by a long planning horizon and aggregated data. For example, a service manager could roughly plan how many technician weeks will be needed for a specific large project in the coming quarter or which maintenance waves are due in which month. Specific daily appointments are not yet fixed, only time blocks or quotas. This provides an overview of future capacity utilization and personnel requirements without committing to individual days.

Typical tools for rough planning are project plans, annual service plans, or capacity planning tools. In the Innosoft system, rough planning takes place in the project management module, for example, where projects are created with phases, milestones, and estimated effort. A project can contain a phase with an effort of 60 person-days, which would be rough planning. Detailed planning would then be carried out later to assign specific technicians to the project in July, August, and September.

Rough planning also takes into account dependencies and priorities at a higher level. For example, in calendar week 40, plant X must be shut down for maintenance, so personnel are scheduled there and other projects are postponed.

An important purpose of rough planning is to create lead time for preparation. If certain peaks are foreseeable in the next six months (e.g., many installations after a major sales success), it is possible to react early, e.g., by hiring temporary staff, training additional employees, or postponing non-urgent tasks. Without rough planning, such bottlenecks would often only be noticed when it is too late.

Rough planning is also relevant in sales and contract management: maintenance contracts, for example, define the intervals (e.g., semi-annual). The service department takes these plans and roughly determines in which months the respective maintenance tasks should take place (e.g., all HV transformer stations in spring and fall). The exact dates are only fixed later.
Rough planning and detailed planning are therefore closely interlinked. Rough planning provides the framework (what basically has to happen when, with what effort), while detailed planning fills in this framework. Together, they form the overall plan.

Modern FSM software such as Innosoft supports both: from project portfolio management to day-to-day resource planning. By recording the rough planning in the system, you can make “should be/is” comparisons at any time, e.g., see whether the planned resources are still sufficient or whether there are any deviations from the plan.

In short: rough planning is strategic and long-term, while detailed planning is operational and short-term. Solid rough planning is essential to avoid chaos in detailed planning, and conversely, detailed planning makes the goals of rough planning achievable in the first place.