Business and management literature bulges with publications promising to help us with business plans in a week, three days and even 24 hours. Their recommended formats for the business plan are, by and large, fairly similar. Although the terminology will vary slightly from author to author, they all suggest we produce an executive summary, a mission statement, an analysis of market segments, profit and loss and cash flow forecasts, and so on. Such a degree of concurrence is to some extent reassuring – if all the available guidance is in agreement, it must be reliable mustn’t it?

Without wishing to decry any of these publications, we would advise a degree of healthy scepticism when deciding what should go into your business plan. Scepticism, not about their advice, but about the familiar elements they recommend that a business plan should cover. We would suggest an approach which questions each element. For instance, does your organisation really need a mission statement? It’s a bald question, which should perhaps be broken down further:

• What will the organization gain from having a mission statement?
• What will the organization gain from formulating a mission statement?

The second question is an important one because, as many organisation that have implemented quality programmes will testify, the process is often more valuable than the result. It is quite feasible that the exchange of ideas sparked by a discussion about the mission statement, or any other element of the business plan, will be more valuable to the organisation than the statement itself.

Programme Introduction

A business plan is an output without intrinsic value. Its value will be realised in its impact on those affected by it: employees, investors, customers, suppliers, partners, competitors and so on. For example, the extent to which the plan is understood and genuinely adopted by an organisation’s management and staff will give one of the strongest indications of its success. In short, a business plan is a communication tool.

A business planning process, on the other hand, can do a great deal more than communicate. An effective process will:

• Inspire participants to re-assess the big picture: where is the organization going, who are our customers, what benefits are we delivering for them, how might the picture change in five to ten years time?
• Stimulate people to look outside the organization, at the environment it operates in, at the likely impact of changes in the environment, at the competition and the support structure.
• Provide an opportunity for objective appraisal of organisational strengths, weaknesses and priorities.
• Encourage managers and their teams to focus on the areas that matter most to the organization, to agree standards for improved performance and ways of achieving it.
• Facilitate cross-functional discussion and closer alignment of activities and resource utilization
• Help to embed organizational priorities and values, and communicate objectives and targets.

In this dossier, it is our firm contention that inflexible, annual business planning rituals which focus on a documentary output are outdated and might even be damaging to an organisation’s prospects when its environment is subject to turbulence. We present a set of theories, tools and techniques to support the ongoing process of planning for business: a process where planning and analysis are continuous, and where plans are subject to frequent review and adjustment.

Part of our aim is to help the student assess which business planning techniques will deliver the greatest organisational benefit, and avoid those time-honoured approaches that invariably result in thick, attractively presented study documents, referred to by no-one.