Planning Cycle:

The Planning Cycle brings together all aspects of

planning into a coherent, unified process.
By planning within this structure, you will help to ensure that your plans
are fully considered, well focused, resilient, practical and cost-
effective. You will also ensure that you learn from any mistakes you make,
and feed this back into future planning and Decision Making.

Planning using this cycle will help you to plan and manage ongoing
projects up to a certain level of complexity – this will depend on the
circumstance. For projects involving many people over a long period of
time, more formal methodologies and approaches are necessary
(see Managing Large Projects and Programs ).

How to Use the Tool

It is best to think of planning as a cycle, not a straight-through process.

Once you have devised a plan you should evaluate whether it is likely to
succeed. This evaluation may be cost or number based, or may use other
analytical tools. This analysis may show that your plan may cause
unwanted consequences, may cost too much, or may simply not work.

In this case you should cycle back to an earlier stage. Alternatively you
may have to abandon the plan altogether – the outcome of the planning
process may be that it is best to do nothing!

Finally, you should feed back what you have learned with one plan into the
next.

The Planning Cycle is shown in figure 1:

The stages in this planning process are explained below:

Stage 1. Analysis of Opportunities

The first thing to do is to do is to spot what needs to be done. You will
crystallize this into a formal aim at the next stage in the process.

One approach to this is to examine your current position, and decide how
you can improve it. There are a number of techniques that will help you to
do this:

 SWOT Analysis :
This is a formal analysis of your strengths and weaknesses, and of the
opportunities and threats that you face.

 Risk Analysis :
 This helps you to spot project risks, weaknesses in your organization or
operation, and identify the risks to which you are exposed. From this
you can plan to neutralize some risks.

 Understanding pressures for change:

Alternatively, other people (e.g. clients) may be pressing you to change
the way you do things. Alternatively your environment may be
changing, and you may need to anticipate or respond to this. Pressures
may arise from changes in the economy, new legislation, competition,
changes in people's attitudes, new technologies, or changes in
government.

A different approach is to use any of a whole range of creativity tools to

work out where you can make improvements. These creativity tools
culminate in the powerfulSimplex process .

Stage 2. Identifying the Aim of Your Plan

Once you have completed a realistic analysis of the opportunities for
change, the next step is to decide precisely what the aim of your plan is.
Deciding and defining an aim sharpens the focus of your plan, and helps
you to avoid wasting effort on irrelevant side issues.

The aim is best expressed in a simple single sentence. This ensures that it
is clear and sharp in your mind.

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If you are having difficulty in formulating the aim of your plan, ask
yourself:

 What do I want the future to be?

 What benefit do I want to give to my customers?
 What returns do I seek?
 What standards am I aiming at?
 What values do I and my organization believe in?
You can present this aim as a 'Vision Statement' or 'Mission Statement'.
Vision Statements express the benefit that an organization will provide to
its customers. For example, the vision statement for Mind Tools is: 'To
enrich the quality of our customers lives by providing the tools to help
them to think in the most productive and effective way possible'. While this
is wordy, it explains what this site aims to do.
Mission statements give concrete expression to the Vision statement,
explaining how it is to be achieved. The mission statement for this site
is: 'To provide a well structured, accessible, concise survey of the best and
most appropriate mind tools available'.

Stage 3. Exploring Options

By this stage you should know where you are and what you want to do.
The next thing to do is to work out how to do it. The Creativity
Tools section of this site explains a wide range of powerful creativity tools
that will help you to generate options.
At this stage it is best to spend a little time generating as many options as
possible, even though it is tempting just to grasp the first idea that comes
to mind. By taking a little time to generate as many ideas as possible you
may come up with less obvious but better solutions. Just as likely, you may
improve your best ideas with parts of other ideas.

Stage 4. Selecting the Best Option

Once you have explored the options available to you, it is time to decide
which one to use. If you have the time and resources available, then you
might decide to evaluate all options, carrying out detailed planning,
costing, risk assessment, etc. for each. Normally you will not have this
luxury.

Two useful tools for selecting the best option are Decision Matrix
Analysis andDecision Trees . Decision Matrix Analysis helps you to
decide between different options where you need to consider a number of
different factors. Decision Trees help you to think through the likely
outcomes of following different courses of action.

Stage 5. Detailed Planning

By the time you start detailed planning, you should have a good picture of
where you are, what you want to achieve and the range of options available
to you. You may well have selected one of the options as the most likely to
yield the best results.

Detailed planning is the process of working out the most efficient and
effective way of achieving the aim that you have defined. It is the process
of determining who will do what, when, where, how and why, and at what
cost.

When drawing up the plan, techniques such as use of Gantt Charts

and Critical Path Analysis can be immensely helpful in working out
priorities, deadlines and the allocation of resources.
While you are concentrating on the actions that need to be performed,
ensure that you also think about the control mechanisms that you will need
to monitor performance. These will include the activities such as reporting,
quality assurance, cost control, etc. that are needed to spot and correct any
deviations from the plan.

A good plan will:

 State the current situation.

 Have a clear aim.
 Use the resources available.
 Detail the tasks to be carried out, whose responsibility they are, and
their priorities and deadlines.
 Detail control mechanisms that will alert you to difficulties in achieving
the plan.
 Identify risks, and plan for contingencies. This allows you to make a
rapid and effective response to crises, perhaps at a time when you are at
low ebb or are confused following a setback.
 Consider transitional arrangements – how will you keep things going
while you implement the plan?

Stage 6. Evaluation of the Plan and its Impact

Once you have worked out the details of your plan, the next stage is to
review it to decide whether it is worth implementing. Here you must be
objective – however much work you have carried out to reach this stage,
the plan may still not be worth implementing.

This is frustrating after the hard work of detailed planning. It is, however,
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 that
might be more successful, or to accept that no plan is needed or should be
carried out.

Depending on the circumstances, the following techniques can be helpful

in evaluating a plan:

 Quantitative Pros and Cons

This is a good, simple technique for "weighing the pros and cons" of a
decision. It involves listing the plus points in the plan in one column and
 the minus points in a second column. Each point can be allocated a
positive or negative score.

 Cost/Benefit Analysis :
This is useful for confirming that the plan makes financial sense. This
involves adding up all the costs involved with the plan, and comparing
them with the expected benefits.

 Force Field Analysis :

Similar to PMI, Force Field Analysis helps you to get a good overall
view of all the forces for and against your plan. This allows you to see
where you can make adjustments that will make the plan more likely to
succeed.

 Cash Flow Forecasts :

Where a decision has mainly financial implications, such as in business
and marketing planning, preparation of a Cash Flow Forecast can be
extremely useful. It allows you to assess the effect of time on costs and
revenue. It also helps in assessing the size of the greatest negative and
positive cash flows associated with a plan. When it is set up on a
spreadsheet package, a good Cash Flow Forecast also functions as an
extremely effective model of the plan. It gives you an easy basis for
investigating the effect of varying your assumptions.

 "6 Thinking Hats" :

6 Thinking Hats is a very good technique to use to get a rounded view
of your plan and its implications. It provides a context within which you
can examine a plan rationally, emotionally, optimistically,
pessimistically and creatively.

Any analysis of your plan must be tempered by common sense.

If your analysis shows that the plan either will not give sufficient benefit,
then either return to an earlier stage in the planning cycle or abandon the
process altogether.
Stage 7. Implementing Change
Once you have completed your plan and decided that it will work
satisfactorily, it is time to implement it. Your plan will explain how! It
should also detail the controls that you will use to monitor the execution of
the plan.

Stage 8. Closing the Plan

Once you have achieved a plan, you can close the project. At this point is
often worth carrying out an evaluation of the project to see whether there
are any lessons that you can learn. This should include an evaluation of
your project planning to see if this could be improved.

If you are going to be carrying out many similar projects, it may be worth
developing and improving an Aide Memoire . This is a list of headings
and points to consider during planning. Using it helps you to ensure that
you do not forget lessons learned in the past.
Key Points
The Planning Cycle is a process that helps you to make good, well-
considered, robust plans.

The first step, the analysis of opportunities, helps you to base the plan
firmly in reality. The second, definition of the aim, gives your plan focus.

The third stage is to generate as many different ways for achieving this aim
as possible. By spending time looking for these you may find a better
solution than the obvious one, or may be able to improve the obvious
solution with parts of other ones.

Next select the best approach, and make a detailed plan showing how to
implement it. Evaluate this plan to make sure that it will be worth
implementing. If it is not, return to an earlier stage and either improve the
plan or make a different one. If no plan looks like producing enough
benefit to justify the cost, make no changes at all.
Once you have selected a course of action, and have proved that it is
viable, carry it out. Once it is finished, examine it and draw whatever
lessons you can from it. Feed this back into future planning.
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