kevin donaldson

I was at a board meeting last week and one of the main topics was that of growth.  Two things came to mind:  Jason Fried's (37Signals) position that growth doesn't mean size, and second, great post on planning for scale by Brad Feld:  Add another Zero.  Brad's post was written primarily in the context of annual planning process but he also suggested how it could be used for day to day metrics.  However, what is often lost is the layers in-between annual planning and the day to day.  This is often where companies get tripped up.  Improving metrics tied to an annual plan that is no longer valid based on current market conditions will more than likely product sub-optimal results.

Given that is mid-way through Q2 I thought it might be appropriate to discuss agility in your planning cycles.  Just as new business plans are a good thought exercise, but should not be used as a roadmap,  the same can be said for ongoing business planning, so how can the planning process be made more relevant?  There are two components to Agile business planning:

1. Organizational Rhythms
2. An Agile Planning Framework

Today I will talk about Organizational Rhythms.  Annual plans are just that - a plan - a thought exercise to help think about the future based on current information.  In modern business, information stays current for a very short time and therefore annual plans can become stale very quickly.  Setting up organizational planning rhythms is the first step to solving this.  Annual plans need to be revisited on a quarterly basis, and in fact outside of annual strategic objectives, you should immediately move to planning the first quarter.  Why spend too much time thinking about details in Q2-Q4?  Just as you might update your financial forecast quarterly based on current information why not practice the same exercise for business objectives and tactics.  There is obviously a very close tie between these two, but is very often miss-aligned.  Once you are comfortable with a quarterly re-planning process, you should look to revisit quarterly plans on a monthly basis.  You can continue ratcheting this process down to reviewing monthly plans on a weekly or bi-weekly and even going so far as to having daily standups to talk about how things are going today vs yesterday.  The work that happens each day is the drive-gear of the organization, but all to often is disconnected from the captains turning the wheel of the ship.  (The Scrum framework provides a simple model for managing the intra-day drive-gear in their concept of a daily standup.)

The problem that most have with frequent re-planning is the time necessary to carry out these initiatives, which become more and more difficult with large companies.  True - if these organizational rhythms are carried out as they are today in most companies - there would be a lot of planning going on but not much else.  If you talk to managers and executives - they couldn't imagine revisiting this process more than once a year, but there sits the root of the problem.  So much can change in a year - the company may not even look like it did a year ago so of course the process is going to be difficult.  However the very act of creating organizational rhythms will spread the effort across the entire year and ensure that the organization stays agile and reactive to changing needs.  You are no longer biting off a years' worth of work but a day, week, month, quarter.  Organizational rhythms allow you to consume in smaller pieces and also allow you to shift quickly as market conditions change, however as stated above the actual planning process itself needs to change as well.