Since you have been following the ‘Doing Good Business Well’ methodology you will have collected a bunch of Business Objectives by now. This will be a set of ‘targets’ that your leadership team have already confirmed offer welcome business benefits, in line with strategy.
Business Objective (be specific) e.g. Redesign Website in line with new branding… then name a given timeframe. It doesn’t have to have an actual date at this stage, just something like Q1, Q2 etc. will do for now. Remember that some of the things your organisation or business wants to achieve may take a few years to reach fruition, but that doesn’t stop you plotting them out now!
Get a plan down on paper, or ‘in the cloud’ or a spreadsheet (euck!) but get it down any way you can. If you don’t have the time or resources an interim project manager will know exactly what to do. In the meantime, here is a popular example of a documented business planning tool:
Make delivery of objectives Measurable by adding some milestones along the way to a final completion date. These will be your checkpoints to make sure that you are on the track to a successful and timely outcome.
Double check that objectives are Achievable – by inspiring your staff with shared goals and incentives. Make sure that your organisation has the right tools and skills in place. (You will need to engage potential functional owners along the way, to gather the right information and get their ‘buy in’ here).
Relevance will be borne out by the business benefits your leadership team has agreed they will reap for each particular objective.
Time-bound Make sure that everyone understands when this needs to be completed by and you will start to get a feel of whether the resources and skills you wish to use have capacity at the right point in time. If not maybe you will need to consider hiring temporary resource to get something done at the right moment. Also consider any other things that may be going on at the same time, which may represent a conflict in effort. Lastly, build in some contingency to allow for changes in circumstance or supply.
Why do we plan our business objectives like this? Because:
– It increases sight of business opportunities and positive outcomes across the whole of the organisation.
– It helps you to anticipate potential threats and how they can be avoided, managed, accepted or transferred away.
– It helps you to manage resources and measure performance. Especially if objectives are SMART enough.
– It enables sight of capacity for change and growth.
– Measuring progress through to completion by being specific about what constitutes ‘DONE’ and inserting some milestones along the way will help everyone to celebrate the quick wins.
– Good planning allows time to inject a good dose of brand and values
Lastly, If this feels a little like you are repeating yourself because you are looking back to the beginning now, to when you started to create business objectives from your original business idea, then we make no apology for this. This is what is MEANT to HAPPEN and as the Doing Good Business Methodology series draws to a close, you will notice that you look to the beginning of the series again and again. This is how you and your staff will know that you have achieved what you set out to do in the first place.