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The Planning Cycle
A Planning Process for Middle-Sized Projects
The Planning Cycle brings together all
aspects of planning into a coherent, unified process.
By planning within this structure, you
will help to ensure that your plans are fully considered,
well focused, resilient, practical and cost-effective. You
will also ensure that you learn from any mistakes you make,
and feed this back into future planning and Decision Making.
Planning using this cycle will help you
to plan and manage ongoing projects up to a certain level
of complexity - this will depend on the circumstance. For
projects involving many people over a long period of time,
more formal methodologies and approaches are necessary (see Managing Large Projects and Programs).
How to Use the Tool:
It is best to think of planning as a cycle, not a straight-through
process.
Once you have devised a plan you should evaluate whether it is
likely to succeed. This evaluation may be cost or number based,
or may use other analytical tools. This analysis may show that your
plan may cause unwanted consequences, may cost too much, or may
simply not work.
In this case you should cycle back to an earlier stage. Alternatively
you may have to abandon the plan altogether - the outcome of the
planning process may be that it is best to do nothing!
Finally, you should feed back what you have learned with one plan
into the next.
The Planning Cycle is shown in figure 1:
The stages in this planning process are explained below:
1. Analysis of Opportunities:
The first thing to do is to do is to spot what needs to be done.
You will crystallize this into a formal aim at the next stage in
the process.
One approach to this is to examine your current position, and decide
how you can improve it. There are a number of techniques that will
help you to do this:
- SWOT Analysis:
This is a formal analysis of your strengths and weaknesses,
and of the opportunities and threats that you face.
- Risk Analysis:
This helps you to spot project risks, weaknesses in your organization
or operation, and identify the risks to which you are exposed.
From this you can plan to neutralize some risks.
- Understanding pressures for change:
Alternatively, other people (e.g. clients) may be pressing
you to change the way you do things. Alternatively your environment
may be changing, and you may need to anticipate or respond to
this. Pressures may arise from changes in the economy, new legislation,
competition, changes in people's attitudes, new technologies,
or changes in government.
A different approach is to use any of a whole range of creativity
tools to work out where you can make improvements. These creativity
tools culminate in the powerful Simplex process.
2. Identifying the Aim of Your Plan
Once you have completed a realistic analysis of the opportunities
for change, the next step is to decide precisely what the aim of
your plan is. Deciding and defining an aim sharpens the focus of
your plan, and helps you to avoid wasting effort on irrelevant side
issues.
The aim is best expressed in a simple single sentence. This ensures
that it is clear and sharp in your mind.
If you are having difficulty in formulating the aim of your plan,
ask yourself:
- What do I want the future to be?
- What benefit do I want to give to my customers?
- What returns do I seek?
- What standards am I aiming at?
- What values do I and my organization believe in?
You can present this aim as a 'Vision Statement' or 'Mission Statement'.
Vision Statements express the benefit that an organization will
provide to its customers. For example, the vision statement for
Mind Tools™ is: 'To enrich the quality of our customers
lives by providing the tools to help them to think in the most productive
and effective way possible'. While this is wordy, it explains
what this site aims to do.
Mission statements give concrete expression to the Vision statement,
explaining how it is to be achieved. The mission statement for this
site is: 'To provide a well structured, accessible, concise survey
of the best and most appropriate mind tools available'.
3. Exploring Options
By this stage you should know where you are and what you want to
do. The next thing to do is to work out how to do it. The Creativity
Tools section of this site explains a wide range of powerful
creativity tools that will help you to generate options.
At this stage it is best to spend a little time generating as
many
options as possible, even though it is tempting just to grasp
the first idea
that comes to mind. By taking a little time to generate as many
ideas as possible you may come up with less obvious but better
solutions.
Just as likely, you may improve your best ideas with parts of other
ideas.
4. Selecting the Best Option
Once you have explored the options available to you, it is time
to decide which one to use. If you have the time and resources available,
then you might decide to evaluate all options, carrying out detailed
planning, costing, risk assessment, etc. for each. Normally you
will not have this luxury.
Two useful tools for selecting the best option are Grid
Analysis and Decision Trees. Grid
Analysis helps you to decide between different options where you
need to consider a number of different factors. Decision Trees help
you to think through the likely outcomes of following different
courses of action.
5. Detailed Planning
By the time you start detailed planning, you should have a good
picture of where you are, what you want to achieve and the range
of options available to you. You may well have selected one of the
options as the most likely to yield the best results.
Detailed planning is the process of working out the most efficient
and effective way of achieving the aim that you have defined. It
is the process of determining who will do what, when, where, how
and why, and at what cost.
When drawing up the plan, techniques such as use of Gantt
Charts and Critical Path Analysis can be immensely helpful in working out priorities, deadlines and
the allocation of resources.
While you are concentrating on the actions that need to be performed,
ensure that you also think about the control mechanisms that you
will need to monitor performance. These will include the activities
such as reporting, quality assurance, cost control, etc. that are
needed to spot and correct any deviations from the plan.
A good plan will:
- State the current situation
- Have a clear aim
- Use the resources available
- Detail the tasks to be carried out, whose responsibility they
are, and their priorities and deadlines.
- Detail control mechanisms that will alert you to difficulties
in achieving the plan.
- Identify risks, and plan for contingencies. This allows you
to make a rapid and effective response to crises, perhaps at
a
time when you are at low ebb or are confused following a setback.
- Consider transitional arrangements - how will you keep things
going while you implement the plan?
6. Evaluation of the Plan and its Impact
Once you have worked out the details of your plan, the next stage
is to review it to decide whether it is worth implementing. Here
you must be objective - however much work you have carried out to
reach this stage, the plan may still not be worth implementing.
This is frustrating after the hard work of detailed planning. It
is, however, much better to find this out now than when you have
invested time, resources and personal standing in the success of
the plan. Evaluating the plan now gives you the opportunity to either
investigate other options that might be more successful, or to accept
that no plan is needed or should be carried out.
Depending on the circumstances, the following techniques can be
helpful in evaluating a plan:
- PMI (Plus/Minus/Interesting):
This is a good, simple technique for 'weighing the pros and
cons' of a decision. It involves listing the plus points in
the plan in one column, the minus points in a second column,
and the implications and points of uncertainty of the plan in
a third column. Each point can be allocated a positive or negative
score.
- Cost/Benefit Analysis:
This is useful for confirming that the plan makes financial sense.
This involves adding up all the costs involved with the plan,
and comparing them with the expected benefits.
- Force Field Analysis:
Similar to PMI, Force Field Analysis helps you to get a good overall
view of all the forces for and against your plan. This allows
you to see where you can make adjustments that will make the plan
more likely to succeed.
- Cash Flow Forecasts:
Where a decision is has mainly financial implications, such as
in business and marketing planning, preparation of a Cash Flow
Forecast can be extremely useful. It allows you to assess the
effect of time on costs and revenue. It also helps in assessing
the size of the greatest negative and positive cash flows associated
with a plan. When it is set up on a spreadsheet package, a good
Cash Flow Forecast also functions as an extremely effective model
of the plan. It gives you an easy basis for investigating the
effect of varying your assumptions.
- 6 Thinking Hats:
6 Thinking Hats is a very good technique to use to get a rounded
view of
your plan and its implications. It provides a context within
which
you can examine a plan rationally, emotionally, optimistically,
pessimistically and creatively.
Any analysis of your plan must be tempered by common sense.
If your analysis shows that the plan either will not give sufficient
benefit, then either return to an earlier stage in the planning
cycle or abandon the process altogether.
7. Implementing Change
Once you have completed your plan and decided that it will work
satisfactorily, it is time to implement it. Your plan will explain
how! It should also detail the controls that you will use to monitor
the execution of the plan.
8. Closing the Plan
Once you have achieved a plan, you can close the project. At this
point is often worth carrying out an evaluation of the project to
see whether there are any lessons that you can learn. This should
include an evaluation of your project planning to see if this could
be improved.
If you are going to be carrying out many similar projects, it may
be worth developing and improving an Aide
Memoire. This is a list of headings and points to consider during
planning. Using it helps you to ensure that you do not forget lessons
learned in the past.
Key points:
The Planning Cycle is a process that helps you to make good, well-considered,
robust plans.
The first step, the analysis of opportunities, helps you to base
the plan firmly in reality. The second, definition of the aim, gives
your plan focus.
The third stage is to generate as many different ways for achieving
this aim as possible. By spending time looking for these you may
find a better solution than the obvious one, or may be able to improve
the obvious solution with parts of other ones.
Next select the best approach, and make a detailed plan showing
how to implement it. Evaluate this plan to make sure that it will
be worth implementing. If it is not, return to an earlier stage
and either improve the plan or make a different one. If no plan
looks like producing enough benefit to justify the cost, make no
changes at all.
Once you have selected a course of action, and have proved that
it is viable, carry it out. Once it is finished, examine it and
draw whatever lessons you can from it. Feed this back into future
planning.
MindTools.com - Join Our Community!
In the next article, we look at the different approaches you
need to run large projects. To read this, click 'Next article'
below. Other relevant destinations are shown in the "Where
to go from here" list underneath.
Spread the Word:
New Articles (Not included in the Mind Tools E-book.)
* Shows articles available in full only to Career Excellence Club Premium members
Work Breakdown Structures - Mapping out the work within a project*
Project Dashboards - Quickly communicating project progress*
Project Initiation Documents - Getting your project off to a great start
Project Milestone Reporting - Keeping projects on track by monitoring check points*
Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) - Implementing new ideas in a controlled way*
Logframes, and the Logical Framework Approach - Planning projects robustly
A full list of Mind Tools articles is available here.
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