How do you evaluate your enterprise? Do you look at it from a start-to-finish timeline, a mass of semi-related actions and tasks, or a clear-cut road map to your next objective? If you have wondered how to get yourself, your project, or your enterprise going from the starting point to completion, a planning cycle may be your best tool.
Planning a Cycle of Action
A planning cycle helps you identify your objectives for a specific goal, time, or event. It may be a corporate objective for the upcoming year. Or it could be a non-corporate enterprise (like a planning cycle for an academic year or a significant community event like an annual street fair celebration).
A planning cycle may be completed by an individual, for use by that individual. It also is a typical part of departmental development within a company and most certainly it is a major part of the executive decision making process as corporate leaders determine the course of their business from a global perspective.
Initially, a corporate planning cycle starts by focusing on these aspects:
• Analysis of opportunities and how to reach them
• Risk analysis
• Analysis of strengths and weaknesses
• Identification of the goals
• Exploring/evaluating options
• Selecting the best option
• Detailed planning (including finances, personnel and materials resources, time frames per task, etc.)
Once you have developed a global perspective plan, the next level of your planning cycle helps you focus on managing the efforts of intersecting processes, groups, and individuals. Mapping out those intersecting elements with a planning cycle tool helps you see the interplay of those elements. Over time, you can identify which projects or tasks are not on schedule, objectives that need to be modified (or even dropped), and highlight actions and accomplishments that have occurred on or ahead of schedule.
Planning Cycle in the Round
Activities and tasks in a planning cycle are rarely accomplished in a straight line manner. The plandisc.com team recognizes the non-linearity of the planning cycle. They have developed unique circular planning cycle templates to help you identify key elements to a project, the people and resources that will help you meet your objectives, and place benchmark and milestone notations that will keep you focused (and motivated) along your journey.
Unlike a traditional linear timeline, the circular plandisc template enables you to view your planning cycle in the round. Each department or group (and some individuals) can work with its own circle template. Then, individual and group plans are relayed to key stakeholders and decision makers who will incorporate essential elements from each template into a major planning cycle template.
plandisc planning cycle templates are fully customizable so that each cell in each ring of the circular template reflects exactly what is needed. The template may be structured to show the actions of a calendar or fiscal year. It can be adapted to plans that must be broken down into smaller increments of time. The circular template can even be “timeless” and used as an overview of a major objective with specific time frames that will be designated at a later date.
Don’t lose track of your milestones and objectives because they are spread across bulky report pages or seemingly endless screen loads. plandisc planning cycle templates help bring you full circle, start to finish, in one view that can be copied, shared, published, and repeated with each new enterprise.