Controlling Operational Trajectory: Management Beyond Financials

This post reminds me of my childhood years as an overly-inquisitive and under-supervised twelve-year old with a proclivity for blowing things up. Now I know what you're thinking… "Every 12 year old boy has an appetite for that." Perhaps so, but I also had access. In retrospect, how enough little boys ever survive their own idiocy to propagate the human race is one of those amazing feats of nature; much like the way a few turtle hatchlings escape frigate birds as they scramble for the sea. By all rights, I should be minus at least one eye and some fingers.

Moving on…

This week we announced some powerful new features that are part of our new 10.1 release of Planview Enterprise. I will leave it to more appropriate vehicles to detail all of the new capabilities in this version, but there is one particularly significant element that bears further discussion, regardless of the tools you are using.

Although controlling money is arguably the most important management lever that you have, it is far from being the only one. In Taming Change, we define operational planning as the process of assessing performance, setting strategy, and managing human and financial resources. The interaction and information needed to analyze market and economic influences, determine product direction, shape new ideas into tangible opportunities and distribute enabling organizational capacities goes far beyond the ubiquitous annual budgeting exercise.

Operational planning does nothing less than set the future trajectory of your organization. Money is like organizational rocket fuel; you certainly want to use it efficiently and monitor its consumption, but it is just a means to a greater end. Somewhere, someone needs to be prepping the payload, setting a destination and controlling the flight. Otherwise you will simply waste fuel, accomplish nothing of value and end up somewhere other than where you intended.

In much the same way that early rockets were simply loaded with fuel and pointed in a general direction, some organizations still primarily manage their future by manipulating the budget. In both instances, the result is most often a lot of smoke, heat, noise and motion, but probably not expected results. Today, we plan the initiative and use sophisticated telemetry and guidance systems to ensure that we reach our intended target and achieve a specific goal. Fuel is only one consideration of the overall mission.

Effective, operational planning incorporates all of the information necessary to make wholly informed decisions by considering a number of different organizational perspectives. So, as you support how your organization sets its own trajectory, be careful that you don't lose an eye in the process -- you might end up taking a myopic approach that misses the target.

Be sure to check out how we are enabling organizations to do operational planning; I can safely say that it is unlike anything else on the market right now and a significant improvement over drowning in spreadsheets.