If you plan in advance and have the flexibility to pivot and re-prioritize, your trip will go much smoother.No matter if you are planning a vacation or planning your next strategic portfolio, when continuous planning is practiced your organization can better:
- Streamline the prioritization and funding allocation process
- Fund programs iteratively and from strategic targets
- Continuously identify and resolve conflicting priorities, capacity, or funding issues
- Enable you to deliver more frequently
- Add agility into your continuous planning process, which offers an important benefit
So, how can you apply this example to the planning process for your organization? To incorporate a continuous planning approach, you’ll need to understand your organization’s current state of maturity.
What is the Current Approach to Planning for Your Organization?
Consider these important questions for not only how you are currently planning but also how you can incorporate a continuous planning approach:
- How is your organization currently planning?
- What types of planning does your organization leverage?
- Who are the key stakeholders that should be involved?
- Is there an existing process to revisit your plans regularly and continuously to ensure the plan is being executed and delivered properly? If so, does the plan need to change?
- What are the incremental steps needed to adopt a continuous planning approach?
- What types of planning are necessary to help improve maturity?
- Does your annual planning process incorporate your organization’s strategic priorities?
- Do you understand the impact of trade-off decisions, accepting new, delayed, or dropping projects within your strategy?
- What happens to your annual plan once it’s been approved?
- How is your organization measuring performance?
Now that you have examined your organization’s planning process, what tools, technology, and capabilities are needed to take your continuous planning practices to the next level.
5 Capabilities Needed to Improve Continuous Planning In Business
As your organization starts the planning process look for a planning tool that allows you to:
- Prioritize your strategies because they impact program prioritization.
- Analyze the demand associated with the programs and outcomes.
- Evaluate resource capacity and budgets. “Do we have the resource capacity to meet the demand in the time frame being requested?”
- Shift investments to balance the available resource capacity in the requested time frame.
- Collaborate with stakeholders. Program, project, and outcome managers need to coordinate availability of resources, honor critical time frames and milestones, and agree on approved trade-off decisions.
To take a deeper dive into this information, I recommend you:
- Watch the full Planning Deconstructed webcast to see a product demonstration that illustrates how to create what-if scenarios and make trade-off decisions allowing you to update plans when unexpected disruptions occur
- Read the Planning Deconstructed eBook
- Visit info/planning, or
- Email portfolio-management@Planview.com
