Definitive Business Plan, Second Edition, The

Creating an operating plan

By now, you could be thinking that I have dwelt very heavily on developing the strategic part of the plan. Maybe I have, but for two good reasons. First, business managers rarely seem to have enough time to think about strategy and I thought it was useful to spend more time on this topic. Second, when the strategy and related objectives are carefully defined, the operating plan becomes almost self-evident.

I think that business plans work best when they are developed using a modification of the objectives down, operating plans up method. The modification is that ideally department managers – and where appropriate their ...