One of the biggest failures in planning is not the quality of the strategies or actions developed but the lack of effective implementation. One page plans can solve this problem and the good news is they are not hard to do.
One page plans can be developed in minutes and can be updated just as quickly. They can be used as control documents for your business improvement process and are easily understood by everyone, your employees, your bank, your strategic partners (and yourself!).
The one page plan is a simple yet effective tool to develop a business or personal plan. Using the Now, Where, How structure it shows where your business, an issue or you are now, where you would like it to be in the future, and how you will get there. It looks like this …..
The key to making the plan work is to:
Identify the current status (Now)
Visualise where you would like to be (Where)
Prioritise three or four strategies
Identify three or four actions for each strategy, allocate responsibility for implementation and allocate a completion date
Identify a performance indicator against which you can measure improvements
The beauty of this format is that it can be developed to cover any level of your business right down to individual employees because you can cascade your plans throughout the organisation as shown below.
One page planning enables a line of sight to be developed from the overall business strategic plan though to teams, projects and individuals. Objectives can be aligned and easily verified to ensure you are on track. If regularly reviewed progress can be monitored and plans updated as one project or goal is completed and the next begins.
Next time you want to implement a project why not prepare a simple plan using this format? Try it out then use it for bigger things. You really can plan the success of your business using this simple tool.
