 An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing. This quote from Dale Carnegie sums it up for me. Effective business planning, whatever the size of the business that you work in, makes a huge difference to staff from around and focus, to the operations, communication and coordination within a business and of course to financial performance. In this video we explore why business planning is so useful and take a look at adaptive business planning which allows planning to flex to the challenges of businesses face in near real time. My name is Jess Coles and I have had a 25 year career in business management across household names like Innocent Drinks and Foster's to many less well known businesses. I've been involved in implementing flexible planning within corporates to SMEs and have seen first hand the benefits. If you're new to this channel Enhance.Training provides online business courses to help professionals, managers and business owners improve their performance. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up, subscribe and share it with friends. As we near the end of 2020 it has been an unforgettable year for most businesses, unfortunately for mainly the wrong reasons. You may be thinking that it's not worth doing a business plan with everything so much up in the air. If 2020 has shown us anything it is to expect the unexpected. It is to be prepared to radically change your business if you need to, whether that's to try and keep up with unprecedented demand or adapt and change your business in ways that you had not even imagined. So considering the turmoil this year it is tempting to wonder why business planning is even necessary. What is the point of spending hours making a business plan when you know that reality will be different? Business planning gives us direction and it gives us focus. It is far better to focus on fewer targets and achieve them rather than try and do everything all at once and not really succeed. A business plan helps the team to choose which goals to focus on. Tests have shown that doing too many things results in none being done particularly well and Common Sense supports this. And finally business planning helps spot issues and opportunities in advance. There has always been a lag between making a decision and seeing the impact of that decision within the business. Planning ahead allows the business to react very quickly and take full advantage of all the opportunities and side step potential problems. Let's start by having a quick look at a traditional business planning approach and why real benefits are often missed. There are many misconceptions about business planning so let's start by looking at what business planning is not. Well first business planning is not simply about writing a document which then nobody uses nor is it just a financial budget which sets out financial targets that everyone must meet without setting out how to achieve them. This is target setting and not really planning. And finally planning is not a magic wand. A plan will require work and it may need a change in how you work to be a success. The traditional method of budgeting or planning is your typical one year annual budget. You and your team spend hours pouring over the numbers and charts to create a plan for the year ahead to meet specific financial targets. The problem with this method is that each department or team must work out separately in isolation from each other how they're going to achieve their financial target. Departments and teams don't really support each other making the achievement of the overall target hard of the business. Then that planning is not really used in the day to day running of the business. It is no wonder that most people see budgeting as a little bit of a waste of time. There are many ways of planning. We suggest that whatever you choose that you build into it flexibility and a regular review meeting. This allows the business to adapt the plan to take into account of internal or external events or conditions thus keeping the plan useful and relevant. Let's take a quick look at adaptive business planning which does just this. Adaptive business planning creates a whole business culture and a way of working that is forward looking, proactive and drives improved business performance. The key features of this method are firstly a long term strategy broken down into three and five year objectives with quarterly goals and alternative plans as needed. Secondly planning and a project and activity level that involves the functional and divisional managers across the business. Third a cross-functional team is formed with decision making authority to ensure project success. Fourth monthly reviews are held with the project owners and management to discuss the progress of each project and what if anything needs to be changed to ensure the success of that project. Fifth each project has their own set of assumptions, milestones, tasks and budget as well as a clear owner. And sixth projects are added or adjusted as required to keep the business on track to meet its longer term goals. The process allows you and your colleagues to quickly respond and drive performance improvements. The key is to create a tactical decision making team at the centre of the business. Opportunities and challenges need to be spotted in advance with time to adjust plans or create new ones to take this into account. There are many elements to getting effective planning in place. The first key steps are one the management team needs to understand and support a change in planning approach. Second a cross-functional team should meet and start identifying distinct projects within the business that will make a difference to the business performance and the financial results. You know examples might include reducing the cost of a key ingredient by 10% or increasing the use of content marketing campaigns over the year to increase inbound leads by 25%. Or it could be paying down two million of debt to create more funding flexibility and business resilience. Or it could be launch four products into specific sales channels to capture a current consumer trend. I'm sure you get the idea. Each should have a short written project plan. Third keep identifying and creating projects until you have met the goals of the business within the required time frames. Fourth set up a review process so the business can keep adapting the current projects and add new projects to ensure the business exceeds its goals. We suggest that you focus the business around a 90 day cycle rather than a full year. This creates a time period that is long enough to get quite a lot done but is not too long that it becomes too theoretical or too far away to create focus today. It will be difficult to start with as most businesses are not traditionally set up to work in this way and behaviours will need to change. Create a rhythm of meetings, meet at least once a month. The cross-functional team must have the authority to make tactical and operational level decisions. i.e. all these meetings should be action-orientated and decision-making forums rather than just information-sharing meetings. This also frees up the management team to focus on strategic goals and hold the cross-functional team to account. Business planning makes a significant contribution to business performance. If it is done well and the plan is reviewed regularly to ensure that it remains relevant and useful. The number of surprises and crises are dramatically reduced and how people work within the organisation becomes a much more proactive approach rather than remaining largely reactive. Productivity is never an accident. It is always a result of commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and a focused effort. I hope this video sparked your interest and given you some ideas as to how to create effective adaptive business planning within your business. If you liked this video then please give it a thumbs up, subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of our weekly video releases. This really helps us to produce more videos to help you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.