If you are a leader in a small or medium sized enterprise/business or non-profit organization you may not have a standardized planning process. Establishing and implementing an effective and repeatable planning process is vital to the success of any team — a standard planning process enables everyone in the enterprise to think through the problem and apply the entire assets of the organization towards solving the problem, while using the same formats and terminology. The military has this with the Troop Leading Procedures (TLPs) for small units and Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) for large units. I used each technique hundreds of times in my military career. Yet, the military planning process is an imperfect fit for the corporate environment.

Modifying the military’s planning process to fit your business or non-profit can be a great start point for establishing a standardized planning process. As General George S. Patton said, “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” A checklist for a corporate planning process to develop a good plan, right now, might look like this:

Company X Planning Process Checklist

• [Leader and the Team] Analyze the problem, the mission, the task, or annual plan

  • Facts and Assumptions (Basic facts and assumptions about the organization and environment)

  • The Market (What’s your market outlook? What assumptions are you building the plan upon?)

  • The Customer (What’s your customer doing?)

  • The Competition (Who’s your competition? What are they doing?)

  • Coronavirus (Current situation on travel, workplace, etc?)

  • Corporate (What are they doing? What’s their mission?)

  • Resources (What is your budget? How many people do you have available?

  • Historic (What did you do last year? What worked? What didn’t work?)

• [Leader and the Team] Develop a course of action (broad guidelines) to solve the problem, accomplish the mission, complete the task, or drive your organization during the year

  • Outline key things to accomplish

  • Outline key limitations

• [Leader] Develop your Mission+Leader’s Intent (See post #25 for how to develop a Mission+Leader’s Intent — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/d-day )

• [Team] Empower your team to develop the plan by providing planning guidance (i.e. What key elements do you want to see in the plan? Use the work developing the course of action and Mission+Leader’s Intent as guidance.)

• [Team with Leader’s Input] Develop, refine and synchronize the plan

  • Empower your team to develop portions or the entire plan

  • Ensure you have thought through all aspects of the business or non-profit, given them tasks to accomplish, and synchronized those tasks

    • Think through HR, Accounting, Sales, Marketing, Operations, IT, etc.

  • Develop contingency plans for 1-2 critical contingencies

• [Team] Write the plan

  • The military develops written plans so when people are tired or under stress they have a written document to reference. On Monday I will discuss a format for a written corporate plan.

• [Leader and the Team] Brief the plan

  • [Leader] Emphasize your Mission+Leader’s Intent

  • [Team] Ensure that the key leaders Back Brief their portion of the plan to ensure that everyone understands (See post #24 for the Back Brief — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/the-back-brief )

• [Leader] Supervise preparation for, rehearsals of, and execution of the plan

• [Leader and the Team] Conduct an After-Action Review of the planning and execution (See post #10 for more on the AAR — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/the-after-action-review ). Analyze lessons learned and implement them in the next planning process.

Using this checklist should help your business or non-profit develop plans General George S. Patton would be proud of. (You can also use it to plan for the next crisis like was discussed in post #23 — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/the-next-crisis )

If you’re a military veteran and using some version of the military planning process in your organization, share what works and what doesn’t in the comments.