If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail...

If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail...
Planning is the most crucial ingredient for success of any business enterprise
If someone were to ask what according to you differentiates a successful organisation from an unsuccessful one – what would be your answer? Although a lot of factors contribute to the success and/or failure of any business enterprise, but one of the key factors, which distinguishes triumphant businesses from middling and failed ones according to various research papers is “Planning”. Moreover, it is not only planning, but also the excellence of the plan that constitutes success along with regular assessments and the preferred modifications in the plan.
"A Plan is a trap laid to capture the future " —Allen

If a satisfactory future featuring maximum goal realisation is what one aims at - effective planning is the only key to reach there. More than two-third of any task can be accomplished well by accurate planning. It has been observed quite often that lack of planning or bad planning gives out just 20% results in lieu of 100% efforts thereby creating a huge rift between effort and result.
meaning of planning
Planning literally stands for a method that helps one analyse whether s/he should attempt a particular task or not. Along with this, it also helps an individual in charting out the best route to achieve his/her target. It also prepares him/her to trounce unanticipated hardships with ample reserves thereby assisting to gain maximum positive results from the given efforts. Good planning also stands for superior stewardship, as it is a must for gaining success in any venture along with careful preparation. The absence of these can however, guarantee failure.
Game plan
The importance of planning is brought home most clearly by the sports. Without proper planning, even the world champions may loose the game receiving the worst of defeats. Planning in sports is referred to as making of a game plan, which is a mere progression of steps that the said team must abide by for accomplishing the final game, which is winning the game. Most of the sportsmen have reiterated time and again that a well-hatched or badly hatched game plan only makes a team to win or loose. This implies that a team who fails to plan a victory is indeed the one who plans to loose. There are a lot of benefits of a good planning. It not only conserves resources thereby preventing wasted effort but also helps in saving both time and money. It can also help by curbing the problems in their very budding stage itself.

An ongoing process
Although change seems to be the order of the day in the fast paced corporate world today yet the importance of planning has quite clearly stood the test of time and has served to be the stepping-stone of success for various enterprises. One may hatch good plans but if they were not implemented well, they would be wasted. Hence, it is not just planning that is essential but timely execution also is equally important. Additionally, the plans must also be updated frequently. Now, this frequency would entirely depend upon the sectoral temperament of the business concerned. But the operational plans
must be updated on a weekly basis at least as a thumb rule whereas the strategic plans may be updated on a monthly basis.
Levels of Planning
Effective planning can take place at several levels some of which are mentioned here below -
Strategic level
Planning at the strategic level signifies the procedure of an organisation defining its strategy or trend. It is then on the basis of these trends only that the resources (human and financial) are allocated to complete a certain task.

There are a lot of business techniques that can help in carrying out a strategy analysis. Some of them are –
a. SWOT analysis
b. PEST analysis
c. STEER analysis
d. EPISTEL analysis

All these processes help one in setting the general course of a business by mapping out short-term to future gains of the business. This process being capable of calculating the probability of success in any commercial endeavor necessarily deals with one of these three questions -
1. What we do?
2. For whom?
3. How do we excel?
The last one however can be expressed in a better way like "How can we beat or avoid competition?" (Bradford and Duncan, page 1).
This helps various organisations to determine their vision as well. This planning can also serve as a valuable contrivance for efficiently maneuvering the direction of a business. But the process cannot however foretell the future conditions of the market. Thus, premeditated novelty and fiddling with the 'strategic plan' must be a keystone stratagem for a business to endure the tumultuous commercial ambiance.
Operational level
Planning at the operational level entails a compartmentalisation of the strategic work plan. It is here that the strategic plan is operationalised within a prescribed time frame. An operational plan serves as the starting point for a budget request for annual operations. Thus, to say, if any enterprise hatches a five-year strategic plan, it would also require five operational plans additionally which would be funded by five working budgets.

Going one step further to a strategic plan, an operational plan (OP) on the other hand tackles four questions:
• Where do we stand at present?
• Where do we wish to reach?
• How can we make it there?
• How can we appraise our development?

And, in order to provide effective answers to these questions, it is mandatory that people who would be responsible for implementing an operational plan should only be the ones who prepare these plans. This can be understood more effectively by the fact that cross-departmental dialogues are often needed for the plans created by a particular department naturally affect the other.

Hence, a good and effective OP must include -
• Lucid objectives
• Commotions to be conveyed
• Quality standards
• Preferred conclusions
• Conscription and human resource necessities
• Execution timetables
• A highly evolved method for scrutinising progress, etc.
Such an OP would hence

ensure a smooth functioning of the routine activities that have been marked important for exceptional success in any venture.
John Preston of Boston College said, “The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression.”
Now, to some of us this may appear amusing, but to those who understand the gravity of the matter, this may appear quite alarming rather. Therefore, to conclude, all I can say is that effective planning is the most crucial thing not only to business enterprises but also to individuals for it can pave the path of long-lasting success by setting realistic goals.