Five Steps to a Mediocre Planning Cycle

In keeping with the spirit of strategy and budget planning season and to infer a bit of continuity to this stream of consciousness (hah!), I thought it an opportune time to air some of my pet grievances associated with typical cyclic planning approaches. I thought about a Top Ten List (no shortage of issues), but figured if you find this personally relevant right now, you probably don't have the attention span for that many. Besides, this isn't a one hour talk show…

1. Don't Provide Top-Down Guidance
   I'm always disappointed by the lack of defined direction provided to organizations during the planning cycle. Heck, even in a commune, everyone gathers around to get aligned on what crops to plant. This is a highly collaborative process with the involvement of many individual inputs — unless a clearly written business strategy is communicated to participants, they are going to have a hard time shaping their input to align to it.
2. Accept the Status Quo
   Too often, budgets are baselined to whatever input was provided the previous cycle as a starting assumption. If you keep doing what you've been doing, then you shouldn't expect anything different, right? The planning cycle is the greatest moment of leverage to shift how business is being conducted. If you want significant change, then utilize funding and budgets to make change happen.
3. Avoid Contingency Planning
   If I am staying current, Greenspan is predicting a 30-40% chance of a recession. How will your business be impacted depending on 08 election outcomes? What happens if oil goes to $110 a barrel or there is a shooting war with Iran?
   
   Nowhere is it cast in stone that only Business As Usual assumptions are used to create a single set of inputs. Extend the value of planning by adopting a PERT-based attitude: develop Most Pessimistic, Most Likely and Most Optimistic versions of the plan, based on a range of pre-defined business environment impacts and assumptions. The degree of variance that results from these inputs provides great insights into volatility and your vulnerabilities, while giving you the confidence that various scenarios have already been thought through and are readily available for quick deployment.
4. Plan Beyond Your Effective Horizon
   If you can only reliably prognosticate 12-18 months into the future with at least half a chance of being right, then don't waste everyone's time asking for a detailed 3-year plan. All you are doing is propagating everyone's perception that this is a meaningless exercise if you ask for information that isn't dependable. Why not ask for a 6-month plan in great detail, a summary plan for the next 6 month period, and only gather general predictions/conceptual direction for the outlying periods. (see discussion of Planning Horizon concepts in whitepapers or web casts available from our PMO 2.0 Resource Center)
5. Drag it Out
   Planning cycles should be approached like bandage removal; make it an acute event rather than chronic ailment. Put enough focus on it to quickly get it over with. A few hairs will grow back, and it's a well established fact that extended planning causes you to pull it all out anyway. If you fuss and fiddle with it for three or four months, you will increase the potential for plans becoming obsolete before they can be put in play, generating a phobia (e.g., Allodoxaphobia, Decidophobia, or Tropophobia), or worst of all, a nasty strep-like planning infection, which is the organizational equivalent of stripping sanity right off the bones. Referencing my entry from last week (If it's football season…), better to do it quickly and often than making some kind of major Broadway production out of it.