Operational Business Planning

Operational planning is the company-wide design of the projects and activities that align with the strategic priorities and should be completed within a specific time constraint. In other words, an operational plan outlines the execution of your strategic plan.

The three key traits of an effective operational plan

1. Company-wide

Your operational plan must include the activities of every team or department that contributes to the implementation of your strategy. Although delegating to them the outline of their own operational plans and budgets is a good idea, you must incorporate every single one of those individual plans into the overall business plan.

2. Transparent

Operational plans are detailed. They break down goals and objectives into projects and daily activities. They include all the metrics and KPIs that you need to track with the values they need to reach. An effective operational plan is easy to navigate and provides a clear overview of the overall progress. That’s because it serves two main functions at the same time.

  1. It keeps the workforce accountable to its commitments and assigned goals. Management can easily keep track of the progress and prevent slip-ups from becoming pitfalls.
  2. It informs people’s decisions. It’s clear to read, easy to find the requested information and provides consistent priorities and context on the things that matter most.

These two functions separate the effective operational plans from the badly executed ones.

3. Aligned

The sole purpose of an operational plan is to make the strategic objectives (click here for definition) a reality. Creating a regional or departmental operational plan that doesn’t align with the long-term goals and objectives of the organisation’s strategic objectives costs time and money. It takes up resources and splits the company’s efforts towards two distinct destinations. Aligning daily operations with the company’s long-term vision and strategic goals is the toughest challenge many corporations face for two main reasons.

First, the tools that most companies use are ineffective. Sheets and slides lack the dynamic properties to align actions and metrics with objectives and goals. You’ll make a dent in your screen trying to navigate through these slides.

And secondly, updating these documents and redistributing them inside the organisation takes weeks. Companies can’t afford this kind of delay in internal communication.

Strategic vs operational planning: The myth

The problem with the conventional way of planning is that strategy and operations happen separately and then, somehow, they have to be combined and in sync. The problem? They rarely blend together well. For example, the operational plan doesn’t change fast enough to reflect a shift in strategic priorities.

On the other hand, you might be unable to overview your operations quickly and easily to determine whether your strategy is actually performing or not.

The truth: They are one and the same

Don’t view your strategic and operational plans as two separate entities. It’s that specific assumption that creates the gap between strategy planning and executing.

It’s impossible with static tools. Your strategy and operational plan must exist together in a dynamic digital environment like Cascade to bridge that gap. Strategy informs and guides daily operations and, in turn, day-to-day activities ground the strategic plan to reality.

How do we help you to build an effective operational plan?

Many things go into developing an effective operational plan, from choosing the right KPIs to track to assigning clear responsibilities and realistic but challenging deadlines. Here we will focus on the two things that enable you to build a transparent operational plan that aligns with your business goals.

Build regular, instant reporting

The purpose of creating a strategic plan is to predict, detect, initiate and lead changes in the market. Executing that plan leverages those changes by aligning the efforts across your organisation.

It’s impossible to achieve alignment without a commitment to regular reviewing. That’s one of the benefits of merging your strategic and operational plan in a dynamic digital environment. You get to assess their performance much more easily.

Build a recurring reviewing habit on every organisational level. Schedule weekly meetings to assess the progress of your KPIs and projects in the front line and monthly meetings to address higher-level metrics and priorities. To make that habit stick, though, you’ll need to make it frictionless. For example, minimise the time it takes to build reports. Determine beforehand the metrics and measures you’ll be discussing and automate reporting using KPI report templates (find out about what these mean here).

Make it executable = accountable + focused

An effective operational plan is aligned with the strategic initiatives, but most importantly, it is executable. Improve the effectiveness of your operational plan by increasing your people’s accountability and focus. Here are two specific tactics you can implement:

First, define one specific owner for every project, KPI, goal or objective in your plan. That person will be responsible for the timely completion of the item. They might have contributors and a team working to achieve it, but they’ll be the ones responsible for its progress.

Secondly, expose your plan to everyone. Enable your people to access it whenever they need it to inform their decisions and work on what matters most. This goes beyond doing some strategy presentations and provides the context of the plan as well.