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CONTINUOUS PLANNING

If your plan has got great ideas about great ways to tackle lucrative markets and you can do them, the plan and the business will be a huge success. "Your business is seldom better than your plan but it is very frequently worse"- GDF

Planning is something every company has to do. Every executive needs to be working to ‘the plan’. Every employee needs to know that what they do contributes to that plan, (enabling them to plan on continuing to be of use.)
Very few business have a sound process for building the plan and even fewer have fond memories of building the last one. The reality is that the leadership of an organisation is continually planning and the plan artifact is seriously lagging behind. That needs to change!

THE CPP™ ANSWER:

Any planning process needs to be inspiring, fast and be able to produce a useful output that continues as a living document. World class organisations still create 3-5 year plans but increasingly they are doing this 4- 6 times a year. This means we may plan out to timeline twelve but we only ever get to do timeline one! The Continuous Planning Process is rigorous in the preparation and fast in the delivery. It produces a working document that expires with the completion of the tasks in it. It distills meaningful ‘in-flight indicators’ and key communication themes and above all is REPEATABLE AT A MOMENTS NOTICE.

There are four steps to CPP planning:
STEP 1 Preplanning - "Assimilation"
If you took a small boat on a fishing trip without first finding out if there were any fish where you intended to go and without checking on the weather forecast, you could have a great day and return with a boat load of fish. However you could also return seasick and fishless or just not return.
If you knew the weather was going to be bad you might choose another destination, another bigger boat or another time.

Therefore don’t plan anything without working out what the planning variables are and having collected all the available information on all of the variables. Preplanning means turning information into “ACTIONABLE DATA” - data that is presented in such a way that it is obvious what it is telling you at a glance. see M4DS

Everybody operates from some sort of framework. If you had a world-class framework to think in and everybody agreed that it was, planning and in fact all life would be much easier. The Continuous Planning Process (CPP) makes use the Malcolm Baldrige Award Criteria as its planning framework.

The CPP process provides a series of fishbone diagram templates to be populated by the organisation prior to the planning event. These fishbones were developed for Baldrige examiners to orientate themselves to an organisation and make very fine induction pieces for new employees when completed; no effort is wasted. available on-line at resource centre.

Templates from BusX® contain 'cross- cutting themes' from the Baldrige criteria that allow you to investigate cause and effect in your organisation. Take the right measurements, make the right comparisons and understand the relative importance of the data before you enter the plan assembly process. The best time to spark new and improved ideas for taking the business forward is shortly after having reached a new understanding of where the business is at and how far or near from best in breed that may be.

STEP 2 Creative - "Inspiration"
If innovation and breakthrough thinking is required CPP can provide a preplanning event whose purpose is not to assemble a plan but to create innovative raw material for that plan. (see services), Content and Process are separate elements when it comes to planning. Different processes are facilitated to produce different kinds of content. All of the content is assembled into an accelerated learning template from Post-it™ note source material on the day.

I was introduced to Grant Ford and the Business Excellence Architects team in my early days as Chief Executive of Downer EDi Works New Zealand. Grant assisted my Executive team to establish a blueprint for the business. This plan was produced on one large page which was visibly very different from any other output we had seen before and became an essential tool to help us share the journey with our people. BEA processes are very powerful and will significantly impact the value of any organisation that has the passion and determination to make a transformational shift.

Peter Reidy CEO Downer EDI Works NZ

STEP 3 Plan Assembly
The CPP uses a simple process to create a Mission FishBone maindmap for the organisation and proceeds to use that visual mission statement to derive objectives or goals the organisation needs to to achieve that mission and know that it had. From these objectives, actions and projects are derived that would collectively achieve the objectives and these are tested to see if collectively they could fulfill the Mission of the organisation.
The team based 'one day assembly' is done using the process described in "The Skinny Book of Planning". The output is all of the actions needed to achieve the objectives arranged in time lines supported by affinity and interrelationship diagrams that preserve all of the synergy information between actions that will allow whole groups of actions to be combined into programs for performance management and communication purposes.
A balanced score card of in-flight indicators is also an output.
STEP 4 Portfolio management
- see article on portfolio management
Why is it that many organisations find that the only way they can get anything done internally is to turn it into a project and run it the same way as they would the projects they perform for their customers?
Why wouldn't it make sense then to run your business performance using project management disciplines?