Last time I gave a short introduction to the concept of planning and today I will continue a more detailed discussion on this subject.

The first question you should ask yourself is: why should I be planning? Many organizations spend a lot of time on detailing plans and planning activities, which end up being just fancy words with no concrete use in the daily operations. The purpose of planning should be to simplify the complex environment that your organization is working in and describe what you wish to achieve and why, when you wish to achieve it, who will do what and when should it be done. On the executive level you also have to add tasks such as coordination and synchronization of the different functions within the organization, in order to make sure that the cross-functional interactions are not counterproductive.

In our planning we should describe not only what we wish to achieve in the end, but also what sub targets we can see. These sub targets should drive towards the end target, i.e. show our movement in time from a current position to a desired position. The sub targets should be described in such a way that we can later evaluate them, which makes it possible for us to analyze and report our performance as well as decide on whether there are reasons to change course.

Planning is also made to identify decision making needs, mainly in those cases that require that certain prerequisites be filled before decisions can be made. Therefore your plan should include what information we need to collect and when, in order to make decisions. That way you can coordinate your information gathering to your decision making and you can proactively make sure that your decisions are based on facts rather than hearsay.

While planning you should also identify some alternative scenarios, in a positive and a negative direction from what is covered by your original plan. Too continuously plan for abnormalities can give an early notice of something that might be actually happening. In order to respond to abnormalities, I can prepare a more or less defined contingency plan to deal with the emerging situation. A negative scenario could deal with an issue such as a competitor who is developing a similar product as we are, though better and cheaper. What will we do about that situation? A positive scenario could be that we are actually looking to over perform compared to our original plan, so how can we encourage even more action?

Finally, to have success with your planning, it’s also imperative that you visualize the plan to those individuals that you expect will implement it. And all in all, you will have a plan that’s simplistic, measurable and understandable.