What’s Working in Your Company? What’s Not?

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If your company is struggling with the planning process, it’s possible that you’re making
it more complicated than it needs to be.  A study done by the Harvard Business Review
found that most executives report making only make six major decisions a year. The
key is to get those decisions right and everything else will fall into place. 

An exercise that can be helpful in identifying those six important decisions is an evaluation of “what’s working and what’s not.” The process is simple: make a list of the major functions/areas in your business and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of how well you think they’re working.  Then ask members of your management team to do the same and compare the results. 

Some of the areas you might evaluate include; production/operations, product/services,
sales, marketing, customer service, strategic alliances, cost reduction, technology,
human resources, and quality. Looking at your business from the perspective of what’s
working and what’s not provides a good starting point for your planning discussions
and can help guide the process to be focused on those areas that will have the biggest
impact on your business.

Building Measurement Into Your Culture

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Measurement is part of the culture of an excellent organization.  Excellence requires having a standard so you know what you want to be good at.  Measurement tells you whether you are. Clear measures help to motivate and guide teams of individuals towards positive outcomes because they provide an objective indicator of progress forward.  An environment with performance measures provides individuals with consistent and clear feedback on their performance.  In fact, learning is rooted in measuring. 

To accelerate learning, organizations should work to have every person in the organization have at least two to three key measures that will help them improve in their roles.

Here are some measures that you may not have considered before:

• Administrative Expense as % of Revenue

• Acquisition Cost Per New Customer

• Training Expense as % of Revenue

• Lifetime Value of a Customer

• Employee Satisfaction

• Revenue per Sales & Marketing Employee

• Support Calls per Customer

• Project Estimate per Actual Variance

What other measurements have you implemented?

Build Execution into Your Business Plan from the Start

If you ask managers what frustrates them about the planning process, they will often tell you it’s the lack of execution on the plan. 

Managers see value in planning and committing the time to planning, but recognize the return on investment is often not realized. This frequently occurs because planning for the execution of the plan often comes at the back end of the process. 

At this point planning fatigue can set in and people may be anxious to move back into a state of action which can be much more satisfying than planning.  

To overcome this frustrating lack of outcomes, it’s important to budget time in your planning process for how the execution will get done. The key is to create timelines around each of the important initiatives that will be tracked and schedule a check-in for those initiatives on at least a monthly basis. 

It’s important to engage all the individuals who will be involved in getting the work done in the creation of the timelines. You must create a culture of involvement and commitment that motivates people to execute the agreed strategies and minimizes distrust, noncooperation, and even sabotage. 

Building execution into your business plan makes the process take a bit longer, but in the end it’s time well spent.

It's Time to Start Planning for Next Year, This Year

Many organizations wait to start their planning for the next year until the fourth quarter, but now is really the ideal time to begin the process for a number of reasons.  First, updating your plan now enables you to incorporate planning decisions into budgeting decisions.  Second, updating your plan for next year requires you to revisit your plan for this year which can provide a good shot in the arm to keep pushing those 3rd and 4th quarter initiatives. 

And finally, doing it now insures it won’t get lost in the year-end, holiday rush that often derails year-end planning. 

One of the biggest challenges around planning in organizations is the ability to keep a consistent and focused view of the road ahead.

It’s not surprising given the fast pace and day to day pressures every business faces, but it’s important to maintain that bigger picture, long term view if significant growth and development is to take place.

There Are Only Three Types of Consulting Outcomes that Add Value

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I read a book that every consultant and every person who hires consultants might want to consider reading.  The book is called “The Executives Guide to Consultants: How to Find, Hire and Get Great Results from Outside Experts.”  Having been in the consulting business for more than 20 years, I was curious to read about my profession from the other side of the table. 

One of the valuable concepts in the book that sounds like common sense but may not be common practice was the list of acceptable outcomes from a consulting project.  The premise is that the only outcomes that really add value are: 1) a recommended decision, 2) a recommended plan for implementing a decision, or 3) the implementation of a plan. 

Over the past several years, I’ve made a deliberate shift in my consulting work to focus on working with clients that need a long-term partner to help them implement their plans.  I’ve found that is the best way to insure successful outcomes.  It is true though, that sometimes an executive just wants the consultant to make a recommendation and isn’t looking for implementation. 

“The Executives Guide to Consultants,” does a good job of providing a framework to determine the specific objective and how to structure the work to insure a successful outcome.