Developing An Operations Plan: 5 Key Elements

By Brittany Andrews

Most organizations are familiar with strategic plans, outlining strategy over a three to five year
period and establishing a stable long-term vision. But these same organizations often
lack operations plans.
What is an operations plan? In short, it lays out the who, what, when, and how of your daily
operations over the course of the next year. It is meant to define how human, financial, and
physical resources will be allocated to achieve short-term goals that support your larger
strategic objectives. On a day-to-day basis, your operations plan will answer questions like:
 Who should be working on what?
 How will we allocate resources on a given task?
 What risks do we face at present?
 How can we mitigate those risks?
Put simply, your operations plan is a manual for operating your organization – designed to
ensure that you accomplish your goals. It’s a key piece of the puzzle for any goal-oriented
team. So what steps can you take to develop a strong operations plan?
1) Start with your strategic plan.
Ultimately, an operation plan is a tool for carrying out your strategic plan. It’s important, then,
to make sure that you have a strong strategic plan already in place, and that everyone
involved in your efforts understands it. Without this guidance, writing an operations plan will
be like trying to plan a vacation without knowing where you’re going.

If you can’t identify how an element of your operations plan helps you achieve a specific
strategic objective, then it shouldn’t be part of your plan.
2) Focus on your most important goals.
There’s a simple rule when it comes to operations plans – the more complex they are, the less
likely it is that a team will follow them successfully.
In order to avoid writing a tangled tome of a plan, focus on the goals that truly matter. Before
you even set down to create your operations plan, break your strategic plan down into one-
year objectives. Then determine the key initiatives that will help you achieve those goals. They
might be:
 New organizational structures
 Quality control measures
 Faster delivery times
 More employee time spent on professional development
…along with many other possibilities. Choose between three and five initiatives that will drive
success in your long-term goals, and then identify metrics that will help you measure your
progress. These key performance indicators (or KPIs) will be among your most powerful tools
for success.
3) Use leading – not lagging – indicators.
Your KPIs will play an important role in your operations plan’s success – so it’s critical to
choose the right ones. The most effective metrics are leading indicators: predictive measures
that show you what to expect in the future and allow you to adjust course accordingly. By
contrast, lagging indicators show you that your progress is falling short only after it’s too late.
If your goal is to reach a certain sales threshold, for example, sales meetings or calls-per-week
might be a strong leading indicator. Based on your past experience, you may be able to
calculate how many calls it takes, on average, to complete a sale. This will allow you to use
calls to determine whether you’re on track to meet sales goals. If you were to simply measure
sales, however, you wouldn’t know where you stood relative to goals and projections until you
were already there.
4) Don’t develop your KPIs in a vacuum.
The KPIs you choose will guide the work of everyone in your organization for the next year.
With this in mind, you should draw on a wide variety of perspectives within your team as you
develop those KPIs.
If your organization is made up of 15 people or less, you may want to hold an annual planning
session where everyone collaborates to craft the KPIs for the coming year. Larger
organizations may wish to restrict participation to their leadership teams. In either case, the
key is to include a range of perspectives in the planning process – but not so many that
effective decision-making becomes difficult.
5) Communication is paramount.
At the beginning of the year, set aside time to share and discuss your KPIs with your entire
organization. It’s essential for everyone to understand why you’ve chosen these specific
metrics, why they matter, how they will help your organization achieve its goals, and what
each individual’s role may be in working toward success.
The importance of buy-in and communication among your team is hard to overstate. Hold
regular meetings – ideally weekly – to communicate organizational progress on your KPIs and
discuss any issues that may have emerged. Whether through meetings, dashboards, or some
other means, team members should be able to track their personal progress and performance
on a weekly basis.
With a strong operations plan in place, your organization should have everything you need to
tackle your priorities successfully – and ultimately achieve the goals that will drive your
strategic vision.
An operations doesn’t necessarily include projects. It defines organizational structure, how
different branches within a company run and what steps they’ll take to reach one-year goals
that are in line with the strategic plan. Once the strategic and operations plans are in place,
then you develop project plans that can help you achieve those specific goals.

Create An Operational Plan

An operational plan forms part of the business’s strategic plan and is important for effective
business leadership. It describes how the work will be done, the workflow from input to end
results, including the resources that will be used along the way, all of which are required for
success.

Streamlined business systems also defines how you will deal with risks, and how you will
ensure sustainability of the project’s achievements.

An operational plan also explains how, or what portion of, a strategic plan will be put into
operation during a given operational period.

What is an Operational Plan?

While strategic planning provides the vision, direction and goals for the business, operational
planning translates that into the everyday workflow of the business that will hopefully produce
the outcomes defined by the strategy.

Simply put, operational planning is the conversion of strategic goals into managed execution.

It deals specifically with the internal operations and resources necessary to produce your
company’s product or service.
Operational Plan: 4 Steps to Success
An operational plan addresses four questions:
1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be?
3. How do we get there?
4. How do we measure our progress?
The key components of a complete operational plan include:
1. Human capital. The staff and skills required to implement your project, as well as
current and potential sources of these resources.
2. Financial requirements. The funding required to implement your project, your
current and potential sources of these funds.
3. Risk assessment. What risks exist and how they can be addressed.
4. Estimate of project lifespan, sustainability and exit strategy. How long your
project will last, when and how you will exit your project, and how you will ensure
sustainability of your project’s achievements.
Operational plans should contain:
  Clear objectives
 Activities to be delivered
 Quality standards
 Desired outcomes
 Staffing and resource requirements
 Implementation timetables
 A process for monitoring progress.
Why have an operational plan?

An operational plan is important because it helps your team to:

 Be clear about where you will get the necessary resources
 Use those resources efficiently
 Clearly define the most critical resource requirements.
 Reduce risks where possible, and prepare contingency plans where necessary.
 Think about the long-term future of the project, including its sustainability.
Who should prepare an operational plan?
Operational plans should be prepared by the people who will be involved in the
implementation. There is often a need for cross-departmental dialogue as plans created by
one part of the organisation inevitably have implications for other parts.
  A project administrator or finance manager should be involved in defining financial
requirements
 Human resources should be involved in assessing HR and capacity needs
 HR, IT or operations staff should be engaged in discussions of processes, procedures and
systems.
Efficient operational planning and implementation calls for ongoing open communication
between the project team and these other staff.

STRATEGIC AND OPERATIONAL PLANNING

Our dedication to our clients begins with strong strategic planning and operational program
assessments that provide independent advice and recommendations for organizational
development. We draw from the collective intelligence of our workforce to help our clients
formulate and develop action plans to successfully implement those recommendations. We
offer the following strategic and operational planning services:
 Mission and Vision Development;
 Situational Analyses;
 Strategic and Operational Business Planning;
 Development of Goals and Objectives;
 Organization Assessment and Design;
 Business Process Reengineering;
 Change Management;
 Communication Planning; and
 Leadership Development.
Our action plans are tailored to the organization's current and future needs, and include
change management diagnostics, which address the natural resistance to change and
developing methodologies to overcome the resistance. Often, a reengineering effort requires a
cultural shift and we educate top management on the principles and tools that will be needed
to build a true commitment to the strategic and operational direction of the organization.

Developing an Operational Plan

An Operational Plan is the next step after a Strategic Plan has been created (see difference
between strategic plan and operational plan).
The task is to take every single strategy
contained within the Strategic Plan and allocate
resources, set a timeline and stipulate
performance indicators.

Each of these elements is explained below:

Allocating Human Resources

Every strategy must have an "owner" i.e. somebody has to be responsible for that strategies
implementation. If someone is not made responsible for the strategy, it is highly likely that it
will not be implemented.

In the operational plan, the person responsible for the strategy is generally referred to by their
JOB ROLE.

For example:

Strategy Person Responsible

Conduct series of three Clinics for Coaches Coaching Director

The strategy may be allocated to just one person, or to a group of people e.g. a team of
people, a sub-committee or a department.

Allocating Financial Resources

Not every strategy requires money, but most will. If people have to be paid to do work, then
there will be financial resources needed for remuneration. If volunteers are involved, money
may be need to be set aside for food and/or other perks for them. Many strategies will involve
administration costs in the form of telephone calls, printing and photocopying and postage.
Some strategies will need purchases of equipment, or materials, or promotional costs such as
advertising.

The point is that thought has to be given to all possible costs that might be incurred if a
strategy is implemented. If there is an inadequate allocation of money for the implementation
of a strategy, chances are it will fail.

Setting Timelines

The implementation of any strategy needs a timeline, that is a time period during which work
is performed to achieve the desired outcome. The time period can be as short as a day, or it
can be several months. The time period could be in the near future, or it might be scheduled
for a future year.

The purpose of inserting a timeline for each strategy in the Operational Plan is to give order to
the great many tasks that need to be done. There is always limited resources and therefore, at
any given time, decisions need to be made as to priorities and where work effort should be
focused. There is no use focusing work effort on strategies that don't need to be completed as
yet while no work is performed on strategies that are urgent.

For example:

Strategy Timelines

Submit application for Government funding of Costing completed by 30 March 2013

new all weather pitch Submit application by 30 June 2013

Set Performance Indicators

There are a number of reasons why it is a general practice of business planning to set
performance indicators. The term 'performance indicator' may be defined as a standard or
target that should be achieved. If the standard is reached or the target is achieved, then the
strategy might be considered as "performed", in other words a success.

Go to more information about Performance Indicators

For example:

Strategy Performance Indicator

Conduct series of three Clinics for Coaches 20 coaches attending each

Host an Open Day 100 visitors from public

Operational planning
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Operational planning (OP) is the process of planning strategic goals and objectives
to tactical goals[clarification needed] and objectives.[1] It describes milestones, conditions for success
and explains how, or what portion of, a strategic plan[2] will be put into operation during a
given operational period, in the case of commercial application, a fiscal year or another given
budgetary term. An operational plan is the basis for and justification of an annual operating
budget request. Therefore, a five-year strategic plan would typically require five operational
plans funded by five operating budgets.[citation needed]
Operational plans should establish the activities and budgets for each part of the organization
for the next 1–3 years. They link the strategic plan with the activities the organization will
deliver and the resources required to deliver them.[citation needed]
An operational plan draws directly from agency and program strategic plans to describe
agency and program missions and goals, program objectives, and program activities. Like a
strategic plan, an operational plan addresses four questions: [citation needed]

 Where are we now?

 Where do we want to be?
 How do we get there?
 How do we measure our progress?
The operations plan is both the first and the last step in preparing an operating budget
request. As the first step, the operations plan provides a plan for resource allocation; as the
last step, the OP may be modified to reflect policy decisions or financial changes made during
the budget development process.[citation needed]
Operational plans should be prepared by the people who will be involved in implementation.
There is often a need for significant cross-departmental dialogue as plans created by one part
of the organization inevitably have implications for other parts. [citation needed]
Operational plans should contain:[citation needed]

 clear objectives of them

 activities to be delivered
 quality standards
 desired outcomes
 staffing and resource requirements
 implementation timetables
 a process for monitoring progress