The Planning Cycle

The Planning Cycle will explain the process of planning for small to mid-size projects. Having a
Planning Methodology will enable your company to build quicker and more efficient plans. It will
provide a repeatable process for planning, prioritizing, approving, executing and measuring.

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The Planning Cycle

People

Product Process

The Planning Cycle is about the intersection of people, process and the product that will be
produced. Managing the efforts of this intersection is what the planning cycle does.

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The Planning Cycle

Do not think of planning as a

straight-through process.

Planning

Analysis Design Construct Implement Feedback

Most people when they think of a plan, they think of a step by step by step
approach. Good plans have built in flexibility but never are step by step.

Business 901
 The Planning Cycle

It is best to think of planning as a Cycle.

Every time we initiate an action in the planning
cycle, it is then implemented with feedback
provided on that action. In this way, it is a very
active process that requires action on a continuous
basis. Planning using this cycle will help you to
Initiate Implement
plan and manage ongoing projects. Once you have
devised a plan you should evaluate whether it is
likely to succeed. This evaluation may be cost or
number based, or may use other analytical tools.
This analysis may show that your plan may cause
unwanted consequences, may cost too much, or
may simply not work. In this case you should cycle
back to an earlier stage. Alternatively you may
have to abandon the plan altogether - the outcome
of the planning process may be that it is best to do
nothing! Finally, you should feedback what you
have learned with one plan into the next.
Feedback

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The Planning Cycle

Ingredients
 Well focused
 Practical
 Cost-effective
 Measurable
By planning within this structure, you will ensure that your plans are well focused,
practical, cost-effective and measurable. You will also ensure that you learn from any
mistakes you make, and feed this back into future planning and Decision Making.

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The Planning Cycle Ingredient

Focus: Stakeholder based

Plans that are not stakeholder based will seldom meet deadlines or finish
within budgets constraints. A stakeholder based plan requires interaction
between all parties including the customer or receiving party.

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The Planning Cycle Ingredient

Practical: Systems based

Planning must be done based on the systems, processes

and people that you have in place. Creation of any of
these items is a plan or project in itself. Success is largely
determined by working with your existing capabilities.

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The Planning Cycle Ingredient

Cost-Effective: Within your Budget

Adhere to a budget. If there is not one, create one. Money is seldom not an issue
but by forcing yourself to be realistic with a budget adds prudence to overall plan.

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The Planning Cycle Ingredient

Measurable: You have to keep score

If you can’t measure it, how will you know when you succeed. Keeping score will
provide measurable results and will let you know how well the plan is being carried
out. People act on how they are measured. Good measures will result in good plans.

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The Planning Cycle

Secret Sauce:
Consider the worse alternative

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The Planning Cycle Secret Sauce continued

Take action to prevent the alternative:

Before it happens!

Fighting fires is very heroic, but typically costly. Preventative action should be
decided upon in the feedback steps. Good firefighters go to a fire with a plan.

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The Planning Cycle
The planning cycle consist of these steps:
1. Initiate
2. Identify aim
3. Explore Options
4. Selection of best option
5. Details planning
6. Plan evaluation
7. Implementation
8. Closure
9. Feedback

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The Planning Cycle

It looks like a step be step by step…

but let me take you through the
explanation of each step then
analyze the actual planning cycle.

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The Planning Cycle

1. Initiate
The first thing to do is to do is to spot what needs to be done. You will turn this into a formal aim at the next
stage in the process. One approach to this is to examine your current position, and decide how you can improve it.
There are a number of techniques that will help you to do this with the most popular being a SWOT Analysis or
Risk Analysis. Alternatively, other people (e.g. clients) may be pressing you to change the way you do things.
Alternatively your environment may be changing, and you may need to anticipate or respond to this. Pressures
may arise from changes in the economy, new legislation, competition, changes in people's attitudes, new
technologies, or changes in government.

A different approach is to use any of a whole range of creativity tools to work out where you can make
improvements:

1. Reversal - Improving Products and Services

2. SCAMPER - Generating new products and services
3. Attribute Listing-Creating new products, services & strategies
4. Brainstorming - Generating many radical ideas
5. Reframing Matrix - Looking with different perspectives
6. Concept Fan - Widening the search for solutions
7. Random Input - Making creative leaps
8. Provocation - Carrying out thought experiments
9. DO IT - A simple process for creativity
10. Simplex - A powerful problem-solving process

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The Planning Cycle Success Ingredient: Begin with the end in mind

2. Identifying Aim
Once you have completed a realistic analysis of the opportunities for change, the next step is to decide
precisely what the aim of your plan is. Deciding and defining an aim sharpens the focus of your plan,
and helps you to avoid wasting effort on irrelevant side issues. The aim is best expressed in a simple
single sentence. This ensures that it is clear and sharp in your mind.

If you are having difficulty in formulating the aim of your plan, ask yourself:
1. What do I want the future to be?
2. What benefit do I want to give to my customers?
3. What returns do I seek?
4. What standards am I aiming at?
5. What values do I and my organization believe in?

You can present this aim as a 'Vision Statement' or 'Mission Statement'. Vision statements express the
benefit that an organization will provide to its customers and Mission statements explain how it is to be
achieved.

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The Planning Cycle
Success Ingredient: You owe it to all stakeholders to research different options.

3. Exploring Options
By this stage you should know where you are and what you want to do. The next thing to
do is to work out how to do it. The Creativity Tools listed in step one can explain a wide
range of powerful creativity tools that will help you to generate options.

At this stage it is best to spend a little time generating as many options as possible, even
though it is tempting just to grasp the first idea that comes to mind. By taking a little time
to generate as many ideas as possible you may come up with less obvious but better
solutions. Just as likely, you may improve your best ideas with parts of other ideas.

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The Planning Cycle
Success Ingredient: If there is only 1 go back to step 3.

4. Selecting the Best Option

Once you have explored the options available to you, it is time to decide
which one to use. If you have the time and resources available, then you
might decide to evaluate all options, carrying out detailed planning, costing,
risk assessment, etc. for each. Normally you will not have this luxury.

Three useful tools for selecting the best option are Grid Analysis, Evaporating
Clouds and Decision Trees. Grid Analysis helps you to decide between
different options where you need to consider a number of different factors.
Decision Trees help you to think through the likely outcomes of following
different courses of action. Evaporating Clouds is my favorite decision
making tool and an extensive study is available through the Goldratt Institute
founded by the author of the “The Goal.”

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The Planning Cycle Success Ingredient: It’s more than a schedule

5. Detailed Planning
By the time you start detailed planning, you should have a good picture of where you are, what you want
to achieve and the range of options available to you. You may well have selected one of the options as the
most likely to yield the best results. Detailed planning is the process of working out the most efficient and
effective way of achieving the aim that you have defined. It is the process of determining who will do
what, when, where, how and why, and at what cost.

When drawing up the plan, techniques such as use of Gantt Charts and Critical Path Analysis can be
immensely helpful in working out priorities, deadlines and the allocation of resources. While you are
concentrating on the actions that need to be performed, ensure that you also think about the control
mechanisms that you will need to monitor performance. These will include the activities such as
reporting, quality assurance, cost control, etc. that are needed to spot and correct any deviations from the
plan. A good plan will:
1. State the current situation
2. Have a clear aim
3. Use the resources available
4. Detail the tasks to be carried out, whose responsibility they are, their priorities and
deadlines.
5. Detail control mechanisms that will alert you to difficulties in achieving the plan.
6. Identify risks, and plan for contingencies. This allows you to make a rapid and effective
response to crises.
7. Consider transitional arrangements - how will you keep things going while you implement
the plan?

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The Planning Cycle
Success Ingredient: Be realistic about your ingredients

6. Evaluation of the Plan and its Impact

Once you have worked out the details of your plan, the next stage is to review it to decide whether it is worth
implementing. Here you must be objective - however much work you have carried out to reach this stage, the
plan may still not be worth implementing. This is frustrating after the hard work of detailed planning. It is,
however, much better to find this out now than when you have invested time, resources and personal
standing in the success of the plan. Evaluating the plan now gives you the opportunity to either investigate
other options that might be more successful, or to accept that no plan is needed or should be carried out.

Depending on the circumstances, the following techniques can be helpful in evaluating a plan:
• PMI (Plus/Minus/Interesting)
• Cost/Benefit Analysis
• Force Field Analysis
• Cash Flow Forecasts
• 6 Thinking Hats
.
If your analysis shows that the plan either will not give sufficient benefit, then either return to an earlier stage in
the planning cycle or abandon the process altogether.

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The Planning Cycle
Success Ingredient: A schedule is as important in the beginning
as in the end.

7. Implementing
Once you have completed your plan and decided that it will work satisfactorily, it is time to implement it.
Your plan will explain how! It should also detail the controls that you will use to monitor the execution of the
plan. Steps that will help you complete the project:
5. Adhere to the schedule and especially to the milestones.
6. Start as soon as possible on each task
7. Work on one task at a time.
8. Determine status with time remaining not with % completed.
9. Use critical path analysis to determine what to work on next.
10. Follow the game plan:
• Huddle up each morning and after breaks.
• Check resources for the right play.
• When in trouble, add resources.
• Emphasize communication

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The Planning Cycle
Success Ingredient: Simple if you began correctly.

8. Closing the Plan

Closing a plan is only possible if it was defined at the beginning. Identifying you aim and having a
measurable objective will allow easy acceptance at the end even if it is not was so easy at the beginning.
Closure is relatively an easy task when done correctly. However, it does mean everything. Paperwork,
release of personnel to other projects, budget analysis are just several of the items that need to be completed.
A closing checklist once developed can serve as a guideline for numerous projects.

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The Planning Cycle
Success Ingredient: The savings will show up next time.

9. Feedback
Once you have achieved a plan, you can close the project. At this point is often worth carrying out an
evaluation of the project to see whether there are any lessons that you can learn. This should include an
evaluation of your project planning to see if this could be improved.

If you are going to be carrying out many similar projects, it may be worth developing and improving an aid
memory. This is a list of headings and points to consider during planning. Using it helps you to ensure that
you do not forget lessons learned in the past.

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The Planning Cycle
The planning steps than are simply plugged in through
a cycle that provides constant feedback and as one
process goes in another goes out. The old adage of
garbage in and garbage out can be very true.

Initiate Identify Explore Options

Best Option

Feedback

Initiation leads to identification which leads into the options available. Always look at the preceding step and
reach consensus before proceeding. It will be a struggle at first but soon it will be second nature to all of the
stakeholders. Feedback insures the best option.

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The Planning Cycle

Best Option Planning Evaluation

Implementation

Feedback

Would you not like to go into each and every plan with the best option available? Would you not like to implement
every plan with an agreement between all people and processes and a consensus on the final product.

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The Planning Cycle

Implementation Closure Product

Feedback
Feedback

After closure, you will have a final product or service developed. Than distributing feedback to the stakeholders will
insure that steps can be taken during the next planning cycle on what was learned during the process.

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The Planning Cycle

People

Product Process

Each and every step includes the intersection of people, process and the
product. A constant remembrance of this will insure that you are not isolated
in your decision making and a clear line of sight will be maintained.

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The Planning Cycle

Plan Now!
Business 901
“if it’s worth doing, its worth doing Now”
www.business901.com info@business901.com