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Planning Effectively
Managing Change
Evaluation of the Plan and It's Impact
Once you have worked out the details of your plan, the next stage is to work out whether it will work and its impact: often you may find that a plan may have unexpected effects, either positive or negative.
You may also find that when you cost the plan, and compare this against the benefits achieved, that the plan is simply not worth carrying out. This can be frustrating after the hard work of detailed planning, however it is much better to find this out now than when you have invested time, resources and personal standing in the success of the plan. Evaluating the plan now gives you the opportunity to either investigate other options which might be more successful, or to accept that no plan is needed or should be carried out.
Plan Evaluation
There are a number of ways in which you can evaluate your plan:
- Cost/Benefit Analysis
This is probably one of the simplest ways of evaluating a plan. During the process above you should have carried out an analysis of the costs involved with each activity within the plan. Simply add up these costs, and compare them with the expected benefits.
- PMI
Once you have carried out a cost/benefit analysis, you may find it useful to mix its financial information with an assessment of the intangible or non-financial aspects of the decision. An effective way of doing this is with a PMI analysis. This is an advanced form of 'weighing the pros and cons', and involves listing the positive points in the plan in one column, the negative points in a second column, and the interesting indirect implications of the plan in a third column. Each point can be allocated a subjective positive or negative score.
- Force Field Analysis
Similar to PMI, Force Field Analysis helps you to get a good overall view of all the forces for and against the change that you want to implement. This allows you to see where you can make adjustments that will make the plan more likely to succeed.
- Cash Flow Forecasts and Break Even Analysis
Where a decision is has mainly financial implications, such as in business and marketing planning, preparation of a Cash Flow Forecast (article to follow) can be extremely useful. Not only does it allow you to assess the effect of time on costs and revenue, it helps in assessing the size of the greatest negative and positive cash flows associated with a plan, and provides the basis for accurate break-even analysis. When it is set up on a spreadsheet package, a good Cash Flow Forecast also functions as an extremely effective model of the plan, allowing the effect of variance in assumptions to be examined.
- Risk Analysis & Contingency Planning
All of the above analyses broadly assume that the plan functions correctly. None of them assess the risks associated with carrying the plan out and the potential costs should those risks damage the plan. These risks can be assessed effectively by preparing a variant of a Decision Tree which allows you to show the major uncertainties associated with different stages of the plan, analysed by probability and outcome. Wherever an outcome is unfavourable, this will help you to assess and plan the contingency actions needed and the cost of getting the plan back on course.
Assessing Impact
It is important to ensure that you do not rely exclusively on the results of numeric analysis as the basis of your plan evaluation. Many factors which are important to the evaluation of your plans cannot practically be quantified.
These factors include:
- Ethical Considerations
This should include an assessment of likely changes in public ethics over the lifetime of the plan.
- Shareholders
How will the shareholders, owners, or trustees of the organisation view the plan?
- Members/Employees
What effects will the plan have on the organisation's members or employees? Should these effects stand in the way of improving efficiency?
- Customers
Will the plan change the way in which your organisation's customers view it? Will this affect their likelihood of reordering?
- Suppliers
How will your plan affect relations with suppliers?
- Public Relations
Will the plan have a positive or negative effect on your organisations relations with the public, press and politicians?
- Environment
Will it enhance or damage the environment?
Any analysis of your plan must be tempered by common sense. It is much better to change a beautifully crafted plan that analysis shows will not work than deal with the consequences after a failed attempt at implementation.
Planning Effectively
Managing Change
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