Definitive Business Plan, Second Edition, The

Responsibilities – and the timetable

As indicated in Chapter 1 you need to plan your planning exercise. The final stages of planning how to plan are to decide who will contribute to the plan and to set a timetable for its production. You want all your department heads to feel involved and to buy into the strategy. Planning meetings help achieve this (see below). You could set up a schedule such as that in Fig. 3.3 .

Figure 3.3. Planning to plan

Allow for additional meetings to review sticky issues. Remember also to build in an allowance for the almost inevitable slippage. You or your staff will certainly get dragged into the day-to-day operational ...