Making Better Goals with a Strong Annual Planning Process
Although it seems like just yesterday that the days were hot and we were at the local swimming hole, this is the time to start thinking about annual planning. Some of my clients have small, simple businesses and handle their planning in an afternoon. Others are larger and more complex, and we spend 4 days over the course of 3 months.
No matter the extent of the process, they all have the same underlying process:
– Assess the environment and identify areas that have potential to improve the performance of the business
– Select the areas that have the best potential impact, and create initiatives to address those areas
– Define and justify the investments needed for the initiatives
– Develop action plans
– Launch the initiatives with managers and staff
There’s a rich set of best practices and tools for each of those steps. For example, many people like to use the SWOT framework to assess their situation. But I’ve found that reviewing hits and misses often provides better insight into areas of improvement.
On my Monthly Strategy Slice webinar, we’ll be looking at a small slice of the annual planning process – how to make sure you have a strong set of initiatives to focus on. On the webinar, we’ll talk about tools to evaluate your initiatives along 4 dimensions:
– Are you focusing externally (e.g., developing new markets), internally (e.g., reorganizing), or a combination of both?
– Are you focusing on initiatives with short-term payoff (e.g., a marketing campaign to existing customers), medium-term payoff (e.g., hiring an important new position), or long-term payoff (e.g., launching a new product)?
– Do you have a mix of initiatives that will have a big (transformative) payoff and smaller (incremental) payoffs?
– Do you have a mix of initiatives that have different investment profiles – some requiring relatively little investment, and others needing heavy investment?
We’ll talk about how to evaluate annual priorities, and how to apply the evaluation tools to your business on my webinar – please join us if you want to see these in action.
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