 Forward planning for managers is an essential part of the job. The purpose of planning is to think through the steps we need to take to reach a goal, hopefully massively increasing the chances of reaching that goal, and hopefully doing so quicker and more easily. Planning for a manager is going through this process to coordinate the activities of multiple people and potentially multiple teams. We plan so that we firstly, we don't let others down or damage relationships, secondly to use as little time, energy and money as possible, while still achieving our goals. Third, so we know which steps to take when, fourth so we can coordinate many people on moving parts, fifth so we can take better advantage of business opportunities or avoid business risk, and sixth so we can consistently deliver thus building our credibility and reputation within the organisations in which we work. I'm going to take you through the four key areas of any planning process and give you lots of tips of what to cover so you can plan really well, deliver what you need to and impress at work. I can't stress enough the importance of planning for a manager. The more complicated the situation the more important the planning process becomes. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in innocent drinks, fosters, EY, peer consulting and many other less well-known companies. I've had the pleasure of working with many excellent teams and we would not have delivered half the benefits and value to the businesses we worked in without good planning. Good forward planning for managers or anyone else involved in organising others or projects makes a massive difference to achieving your goals. So please spend time getting good at this skill. And if you're new to this channel, Enhance.training provides online business courses to help you improve personal performance and that of your team and business. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Firstly, before we go into four planning for managers, let's touch on five different types or levels of planning that you're likely to be involved in. Take a look in the description below or in the info cards for more information. So the first is strategic planning. Strategic planning is usually high level and long term, i.e. more than one year and it maps out the activities, investments and projects that the leaders and managers in a business are going to make to support reaching their strategic goals. Your examples might include investing in a new factory, selling in a new country or entering a completely new market. The second is tactical planning, which is shorter term, typically over three to 12 months and are the main in-year activities that you're going to do to achieve your annual goals. Examples might include extending a product range or investing in increasing capacity at your factory or entering an adjacent market. The third is operational planning or day-to-day planning. It is very short-term, operational planning is what you need to do to keep everything running well for today, for this week and for this month. Examples might include planning staff rotors or when to book in deliveries to clients or deliveries from suppliers or booking in customer sales meetings and so on. The fourth is project planning from small through to large projects and is delivered over a wide range of timeframes. All managers will be fairly familiar with project planning at some level. And lastly, budgeting. Is the process of translating all the activities, investments and benefits into a financial picture so we can check the results we're going to get from our efforts and we can measure financial progress. Again, every manager should be familiar with budgeting at some level. So let's go through four areas that you will need to think about in your forward planning, whether it's day-to-day planning through to strategic planning. The first area to think about when forward planning for managers is what goal do we want to achieve as a result of our planning process? This is a critical step for the rest of the planning process. The more specific you make what you want to achieve or your goal, the easier it will be to plan and the clearer your plan is likely to be. Try not to start the planning process until your goal or outcome is clear, specific and written down. And when you're working out the goal or the outcome you want to achieve, think about how both the internal and external influences will affect your ability to get to your goal. When analyzing external influences, tools like the SWOT analysis or a PESTAL analysis are really useful. And remember, external factors are much more likely to be outside of your control and influence, which makes it harder to achieve the goal, i.e. there is more risk in your plan. For instance, customers buy when they want to, not when you want them to. So build an increasing levels of contingency or safety margin into your forward plan for reducing levels of control. And when thinking about your goals, plan how you're going to measure progress toward your goal and be clear when you have actually reached your goal. How will you know if you're on track or falling behind? Just remember that financial metrics are usually lagging metrics. They take time to become apparent. So think of other metrics that you can track, which will give you an earlier insight into progress against your forward plan. And when planning, also work through all the factors that will stop you achieving your plan, i.e. think about the risk factors to your plan and how you're going to mitigate or avoid these risks. Be clear and realistic about what needs to go well for your plan to work and to enable you to reach your goal. The second area to think about when forward planning for managers is the when or the timeframes to achieve your goal. The timeframes are critically important to your planning process. For instance, an easy activity to complete can become nearly impossible with unrealistically short timeframes. You must be realistic about your timeframes and the resources you have available to achieve the goal in the timeframes you're considering. The speed, cost, quality triangle holds true. You can always have two sides, but rarely three. Again, consider what factors are within your control and which factors are not. The less control you have, the more risk you have of the planned goal not being met within the timeframe. So build in an amount of contingency. As we all know, most plans do not work perfectly. Something always pops up, even if it's just a higher priority activity or project that eats up the time that you had planned for the original activity or project. The more complex your plan is, the more likely something will not go quite to plan. So build in more contingency time, the more complex your plan is, giving yourself time and opportunity to recover from any missteps. Another very useful approach is to set out the timeframe for your end goal and then choose multiple mini goals to achieve on the way to achieving the end goal. Set timeframes for each of these mini goals. Milestones give you early warning if you are falling behind and a really good way to measure progress. The third area to think about when for planning for managers is who is going to be involved in what you're planning. Think about all the stakeholders of the project or activity that you're planning. Who will be involved in it and who will be responsible for delivering the goal? Do these people have the right capabilities to undertake the work and activities that you're planning and reach the goal in the set timeframes being considered? Do these people have enough capacity to do what is required when it's required? And I know these seem like really obvious questions, yet so many leaders and managers in businesses forget to pay enough attention to who must do the work and their skills and capacity or the lack of them. Getting individuals who need to deliver the full plan really brought into the plan is definitely going to increase the likelihood of the plan being successful, possibly significantly. A very good way to get this buy-in is to ask the individuals to contribute to or even create the plan itself. It is then their plan too, rather than just your plan. Getting input into the plan and challenging the assumptions within your full plan is also likely to make the full plan more successful. It is much quicker and easier to change or improve a plan on paper than it is to change it part the way through an implementation. The more complex your plan or longer term it is, the more time and effort I suggest you spend getting input, challenge and buy-in with all the people the plan involves or affects. This gives you the best chance of a robust implementation of the plan and the team keen and willing to do the work to implement the plan. The fourth area to think about when full planning for managers is the how the plan is going to be put into practice, i.e. what steps are needed to make the full plan a reality. Implementation is nearly always the hardest step to achieve and if the step is weak then the plan is likely to fail. An idea or plan remains just that unless you can practically bring it into reality. Ideally you want to create a roadmap that gives clear direction or instructions on the steps and activities to undertake for individuals that will need to implement your plan. Let me give you a really simple example. Your target is to achieve revenue growth of £400,000 this year. This is a goal or target, not a full plan. Obvious I know, yet how often are teams given targets rather than plans and left to try and achieve them with minimal help? You know compare this to We plan to achieve a revenue growth of £400,000 this year by, firstly, targeting ABC limited where we have strong relationships and an opportunity to win a £500,000 tender. Assume a 30% chance of winning. Second, targeting DEF limited where we have reasonable relationships and we know they're expanding into Europe this year and using our system will save them millions. The opportunity is worth around £300,000 and we think we've got a 50% chance of winning it. Third, targeting JK limited, LM limited, NP limited and RS limited by mapping out all the key people in their companies and building relationships with them. We think the opportunity value is about £200,000 each and with a 20% chance of winning each opportunity. The suggested approach to targeting is and obviously go on to describe that. This second example is a four plan as it is much more specific, provides assumptions and direction for the team and is based on practical identifiable steps. Knowing who will be implementing your plan helps before planning out the detail within each step. The less skilled and experienced individuals, the more detail you will need to provide them within your plan if you want the plan implemented successfully. And the more experienced individuals are more likely to want a broad plan, giving them the opportunity to fill in the gaps as such, thus making the project more rewarding for these individuals who can also improve their four planning skills. Clearly, a lot of judgment is needed to get the right level of detail within the plan. If in doubt, err on the more detailed side. An even better step is getting those individuals implementing to help you plan. Coach them through the steps they need to take to achieve the result that you're looking for rather than just telling them what to do. The coaching approach means the individuals have the right level of guidance, have contributed a lot into the plan, have greater ownership and are thus more likely to be a lot more motivated to achieve the goal set out within the plan. Another very useful step is listing out the assumptions you have made in your plan. Being clear on the assumptions provides more clarity for yourself and others looking at the plan. Listing assumptions allows those assumptions to be questioned and challenged in a more constructive way compared to if you don't actually include them at all. And this in turn leads to a more robust, practical four planning without as much conflict between the implementers of the plan and their managers. So in summary, there you have four key areas to include in any four planning that you do. Four planning for managers is more involved simply because managers have more complex projects and more people to plan for. The four areas we've covered apply to any size of project plan from the simple all the way through to the complex with multiple sub projects and dependencies etc and many more people and stakeholders involved. Planning is a critical part of any manager's job and I hope you do well with your full planning. And as always if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.