The Winning Manager’s Playbook

Creating a planning process

So what do we mean by a planning process? Isn’t that just a confusing way of saying that we’re going to make a plan?

Here’s how we think of it: The planning process is an organized manner for obtaining interrelated information to create an effective plan. A key word here is “organized.” An effective planning process relies on an organized manner of collecting and analyzing all relevant information, and a good plan is the product of this effort.

We’re going to give you some guidance on building a planning process, but first we want to give you some examples. This will illustrate the value of a process clearly, before you get into the details of creating an actual process for your company.

If you were a home builder, ...