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Operational Planning

Operational planning definition.

What does operational planning mean? Operational planning is a process that involves creating a detailed roadmap to align with a strategic plan.

The operational plan itself is a document that outlines timelines, action items, and critical milestones for executing the strategic plan. This document defines the organization’s objectives and goals and clarifies how to achieve them.

An operational planning process involves examining how a business operates and laying out who’s responsible for what and when.

Remember, every company approaches this differently, and annual operational plans are constantly updated or changed. The key to making it work? Clear and collaborative communication.

The timeframe to execute a plan typically depends on an organization’s velocity. For example, creating an annual operational plan is a fluid, changing process.

A well-conceived business operational plan keeps team members collaborating smoothly, ensures everyone knows what needs to be done and what their part is, and guides critical decisions about long-term strategy.

Critical steps of operational planning

Clearly define the goal or vision for the operational plan.

Analyze and identify essential business stakeholders, team members, budgets, and resources.

1. Clearly define the goal or vision for the operational plan.

2. Analyze and identify essential business stakeholders, team members, budgets, and resources.

3. Accurately plan for risk.

4. Consistently track performance.

5. Communicate to team members and stakeholders about progress.

6. Adapt the operational plan to broader company goals as needed.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning faqs.

What is operational planning for the business? Operational planning in business entails a team or department working to carry out a strategic plan. It’s a forward-looking process that outlines departmental goals, resources, and budget to ensure team-based activities align with the strategic plan.

Effective operational business plans rely on the commitment of the entire team or department. This buy-in ensures issues are promptly reported, goals are identified, timelines are adhered to, and business collaboration is optimized.

When there’s transparent communication between the finance department and the rest of the business, operational plans become even more efficient in driving the organization toward its objectives.

Examples of operational planning:

• A manufacturing company is developing a plan to boost revenue by 30%.
• Finance collaborating with sales, marketing, operations management, and other vital areas to align strategies supporting revenue growth and achieving business goals.
• A brand planning to launch a new product involves market research, R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, distribution, sales, marketing, and customer support.

Why is Operational Planning Important?

Just as a roadmap helps you navigate a physical journey, an operational plan guides your organization on its path to success.

Everyone on the team can refer to a single source of truth to understand the organization’s direction and how their roles contribute to achieving the overall goals. An operational plan is a living document that should be reviewed and updated regularly. It should be adaptable to changing circumstances and also provide stability and direction for your organization.

What are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

As we said, think of operational planning as the roadmap that keeps your business on the right track, regardless of size.

One of the most significant advantages of operational planning is getting everyone on the same page, working together like a well-oiled machine to reach your strategic company goals.

Operational planning helps leadership define responsibilities, daily tasks, and activities in detail. It also shows how team members support overall department and organizational goals and describes outcomes to measure against daily tasks.

It also boosts team productivity. Operational planning enhances efficiency, productivity, and profits by ensuring employees in each department and across the company know their daily responsibilities and objectives.

Here are some of the benefits of having a robust operational plan:

• Improved communication: An operational plan ensures everyone understands the organization’s goals and priorities.
• Increased efficiency: An operational plan streamlines your organization’s operations and improves its efficiency.
• Reduced risk: An operational plan allows organizations to identify and mitigate risks.
• Enhanced decision-making: An operational plan can help your organization make better decisions by providing a framework for evaluating different options.
• Improved accountability: An operational plan can hold your organization accountable for its performance.

Remember, operational plans are built by humans and are susceptible to human error. But when you weigh the pros against the cons, it’s clear that all organizations benefit from an operational plan in place to support growth.

Who is Responsible for Operational Planning?

Typically, an operational plan lives in the realm of middle management — in contrast to the C-suite’s strategic plan.

Operational plans have a narrower scope and focus on routine tasks that continuously evolve. Changes to the strategic plan are typically less frequent compared to operational plans.

There are several factors to consider when determining who creates operational plans: <H3>

• Scope. An operational plan is laser-focused on the initiative itself and the team, ensuring the scope is manageable. It should include the “who, what, and when” for every activity.
• Timeline . The duration of an operational plan can vary depending on the organization’s speed and velocity. It can cover a quarter, six months, or a fiscal year.
• Stakeholders. To accurately plan the work, involve operational planning stakeholders who are close to the work. Finance, in particular, plays a vital role in aligning tactical details with strategic execution.

Strategic Planning vs Operational Planning

Strategic, tactical, and operational planning are distinct yet interconnected processes organizations use to achieve their goals. Each level of planning has a specific focus and timeframe.

Let’s look at each type of plan in detail.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan describes an organization’s high-level goals, long-term vision, and mission, usually over the next three to five years.

This type of plan also details any significant projects or initiatives that must happen to meet this vision and how the organization will broadly measure the goals.

A strategic plan provides a big-picture view of the organization’s direction and broad objectives. In other words, it’s a visionary plan that doesn’t address the steps needed to achieve them.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan (also known as an operation plan, work plan, or operations plan) is a detailed outline of what a team or department will focus on in the immediate future, typically within the upcoming year.

The operational plan answers questions about weekly goals, tasks, and responsibilities, ensuring alignment with the organization’s strategic goals and mission.

What is a tactical plan?

A tactical plan maps out the steps an organization or team must take after creating their strategic and operational plans.

It involves breaking down strategic and operational plans into smaller, more manageable goals and objectives.

Tactical plans define the steps and actions needed to achieve the desired outcomes.

Critical differences between strategic planning, operational planning, and tactical planning

• Strategic plans focus on long-term goals and the overall direction of the organization.
• Operational plans focus on short-term, day-to-day activities and implementation.
• Tactical plans bridge the gap between strategic and operational planning, ensuring that the goals outlined in the strategic plan are achievable through specific actions.

The Best Plan for Your Team

Remember, strategic, tactical, and operational planning work together to ensure organizations have a clear and actionable roadmap for achieving their goals.

Strategic planning is essential for setting the long-term direction, while operational planning is crucial for executing day-to-day activities. Tactical planning can break down goals into smaller, achievable steps.

What is the Operational Planning Process?

Remember these best practices and operational planning techniques when building an operational planning cycle.

Research and Identify Goals

The goal of an operational plan is to address foundational questions.

Start by reviewing your strategic plan. Ask yourself, “How will our actions shape our organization?”

From there, consider the following factors:

1. Resources. What is your operating budget? How does it compare to previous years?

2. Staffing. Do you have enough talent to achieve your goals? How do you want to grow your workforce over one, two, and three years?

3. Tools. What operational planning methodology will you use to carry out your plan? What are the operational planning tools you will use?

4. Team alignment. Have you effectively communicated your organization’s vision for the future to your team members?

5. Performance benchmarks. How will you measure progress?

6. Prioritize feedback. Be willing to accept feedback and adjust the operational plan as necessary.

Visualize the Operational Plan

To bring your operational plan to life, you must clearly articulate it to your team.

Project management software can offer all stakeholders a high-level view of tasks and progress. Identify which operational business planning techniques and tools will best achieve the organization’s goals.

Operational planning software can be a valuable asset throughout the process.

Assign People and Budget

In operational planning, budgeting involves assigning tasks and allocating resources to team members to achieve specific financial goals.

Each budget item should align with the strategic objectives outlined in the operational plan, with corresponding timelines and deliverables.

Tracking and Informing Progress

To ensure effective monitoring and progress reporting, establish a reporting system that aligns with the goals, targets, deliverables, resource allocation, and timetables outlined in the operational plan.

This reporting process allows stakeholders to provide regular feedback on the plan’s implementation and track advancements toward achieving the desired outcomes.

Adjust the Operational Plan as Needed

The most effective operational plans can identify areas for improvement. The team can then strategically adjust the plan, involve additional members, and proceed toward the next benchmark with a refined approach.

What Should Operational Planning Include?

No two operational plans are alike. What is consistent across plans is that the primary goal is to create a functional operational plan that aligns with the organization’s mission and strategic plan.

A clearly defined operational plan ensures that every manager and employee understands their specific responsibilities and the methods and timing of their execution.

Here are key elements of an operational plan:

• A title page. This summarizes the operational plan.
• An executive summary. This provides a few sentences with a rough idea of the overall plan and its primary sections.
• Mission statement. A clear and concise statement of your organization’s purpose and values.
• Vision statement. A description of what your organization will achieve. This will come from your strategic plan.
• Goals and KPIs. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives your organization wants to achieve.
• Timeline. A schedule of when your organization plans to achieve its goals and objectives.
• Financial summary. A detailed plan of how your organization will allocate its financial resources.
• Hiring plan. Determine how many monthly/quarterly team members to hire across different departments.
• Strategies. The methods your organization will use to achieve its goals.
• Tactics. The specific actions your organization will take to implement its strategies.
• Key assumptions and risks. Provide a risk analysis to mitigate issues before they arise.
• Metrics. The measures your organization will use to track its progress and evaluate its success.
• Next steps. Suggest next steps, if any.

What are the Steps to Build an Operational Plan?

Operational planning aims to create a practical plan that supports existing strategic goals, not to generate new ones.

Like project planning, operational planning is never a one-and-done task but a continuous process.

Here are the steps you need to get started:

1. Start with a strategic plan

Before diving into operational details, establish the long-term vision and goals through a strategic plan.

The leadership team should create and monitor the strategic plan, making necessary adjustments.

2. Sharpen the scope

Narrow down the operational plan’s scope to a specific department, team, or focus area.

Start big with the strategic plan, then narrow down to the operational plan. From there, focus on the tactical areas you need to see your plan through — in other words, a supporting action plan.

3. Identify key stakeholders

Before executing the operational plan, it’s crucial to recognize the key stakeholders involved in the operational planning process.

These team members play a vital role in leading and informing others. Identifying these team members in advance ensures effective communication and successful execution of the operational plan.

4. Create the operational plan

Your operational plan outlines the timeframe for achieving specific goals and presents the team’s actions. It must include objectives, deliverables, quality standards (if any), desired outcomes, operating budget, staffing and resource requirements, and progress and monitoring information.

5. Share the operational plan

Share the operational plan with key stakeholders so they understand mission-critical goals and the daily tasks that support them.

Track progress in real-time for best results. This also allows you to update the operational plan and report on progress to team members and stakeholders as needed.

Does Planful Help With Operational Planning?

Absolutely! Planful’s Financial Performance Management platform seamlessly integrates the demand for structured planning in finance with the business’s need for dynamic planning.

With Planful, you can create collaborative financial plans that align resources with strategic goals. Planful also automates the data collection process for operational planning, saving you from a time-consuming, manual process.

The platform’s agility enables you to adapt and pivot quickly in response to changing business conditions. You can reliably model numerous scenarios and effortlessly convert annual plans into quarterly or monthly rolling forecasts, all tailored to the organization’s current requirements.

Learn more about Planful’s Operational Planning solution .

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How To Write the Operations Plan Section of the Business Plan

Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.

Stage of Development Section

Production process section, the bottom line, frequently asked questions (faqs).

The operations plan is the section of your business plan that gives an overview of your workflow, supply chains, and similar aspects of your business. Any key details of how your business physically produces goods or services will be included in this section.

You need an operations plan to help others understand how you'll deliver on your promise to turn a profit. Keep reading to learn what to include in your operations plan.

Key Takeaways

• The operations plan section should include general operational details that help investors understand the physical details of your vision.
• Details in the operations plan include information about any physical plants, equipment, assets, and more.
• The operations plan can also serve as a checklist for startups; it includes a list of everything that must be done to start turning a profit.

In your business plan , the operations plan section describes the physical necessities of your business's operation, such as your physical location, facilities, and equipment. Depending on what kind of business you'll be operating, it may also include information about inventory requirements, suppliers, and a description of the manufacturing process.

Keeping focused on the bottom line will help you organize this part of the business plan.

Think of the operating plan as an outline of the capital and expense requirements your business will need to operate from day to day.

You need to do two things for the reader of your business plan in the operations section: show what you've done so far to get your business off the ground and demonstrate that you understand the manufacturing or delivery process of producing your product or service.

When you're writing this section of the operations plan, start by explaining what you've done to date to get the business operational, then follow up with an explanation of what still needs to be done. The following should be included:

Production Workflow

A high-level, step-by-step description of how your product or service will be made, identifying the problems that may occur in the production process. Follow this with a subsection titled "Risks," which outlines the potential problems that may interfere with the production process and what you're going to do to negate these risks. If any part of the production process can expose employees to hazards, describe how employees will be trained in dealing with safety issues. If hazardous materials will be used, describe how these will be safely stored, handled, and disposed.

Industry Association Memberships

Show your awareness of your industry's local, regional, or national standards and regulations by telling which industry organizations you are already a member of and which ones you plan to join. This is also an opportunity to outline what steps you've taken to comply with the laws and regulations that apply to your industry. 

Supply Chains

An explanation of who your suppliers are and their prices, terms, and conditions. Describe what alternative arrangements you have made or will make if these suppliers let you down.

Quality Control

An explanation of the quality control measures that you've set up or are going to establish. For example, if you intend to pursue some form of quality control certification such as ISO 9000, describe how you will accomplish this.

While you can think of the stage of the development part of the operations plan as an overview, the production process section lays out the details of your business's day-to-day operations. Remember, your goal for writing this business plan section is to demonstrate your understanding of your product or service's manufacturing or delivery process.

When writing this section, you can use the headings below as subheadings and then provide the details in paragraph format. Leave out any topic that does not apply to your particular business.

Do an outline of your business's day-to-day operations, including your hours of operation and the days the business will be open. If the business is seasonal, be sure to say so.

The Physical Plant

Describe the type, site, and location of premises for your business. If applicable, include drawings of the building, copies of lease agreements, and recent real estate appraisals. You need to show how much the land or buildings required for your business operations are worth and tell why they're important to your proposed business.

The same goes for equipment. Besides describing the equipment necessary and how much of it you need, you also need to include its worth and cost and explain any financing arrangements.

Make a list of your assets , such as land, buildings, inventory, furniture, equipment, and vehicles. Include legal descriptions and the worth of each asset.

Special Requirements

If your business has any special requirements, such as water or power needs, ventilation, drainage, etc., provide the details in your operating plan, as well as what you've done to secure the necessary permissions.

State where you're going to get the materials you need to produce your product or service and explain what terms you've negotiated with suppliers.

Explain how long it takes to produce a unit and when you'll be able to start producing your product or service. Include factors that may affect the time frame of production and describe how you'll deal with potential challenges such as rush orders.

Explain how you'll keep  track of inventory .

Feasibility

Describe any product testing, price testing, or prototype testing that you've done on your product or service.

Give details of product cost estimates.

Once you've worked through this business plan section, you'll not only have a detailed operations plan to show your readers, but you'll also have a convenient list of what needs to be done next to make your business a reality. Writing this document gives you a chance to crystalize your business ideas into a clear checklist that you can reference. As you check items off the list, use it to explain your vision to investors, partners, and others within your organization.

What is an operations plan?

An operations plan is one section of a company's business plan. This section conveys the physical requirements for your business's operations, including supply chains, workflow , and quality control processes.

What is the main difference between the operations plan and the financial plan?

The operations plan and financial plan tackle similar issues, in that they seek to explain how the business will turn a profit. The operations plan approaches this issue from a physical perspective, such as property, routes, and locations. The financial plan explains how revenue and expenses will ultimately lead to the business's success.

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What is an Operational Plan? A Complete Playbook (+ Examples, Tips & More)

Introduction.

Without a plan, your business operations are as good as a children’s playground—everyone’s doing their own thing with no care in the world. 

An operational plan brings order to your organization. It defines the functional aspects of your long-term strategy, like goals, milestones, responsibilities and timelines, to build collaboration and make real progress toward your vision. 

Teams often overlook the importance of operational plan management, leading to miscommunication, unnecessary roadblocks and slow growth. 

If you don't want to end up in a chaotic playground with everything going south, read this start-to-finish guide on operational planning. We'll share a 6-step process of making your own operational plan with a few examples to inspire you.

TL;DR: What is an operational plan?

• An operational plan clarifies the details of your strategy, assigns responsibilities, and sets milestones and timelines.
• Use an operational plan to create a roadmap, assign roles, track progress, establish criteria for success, and minimize errors.
• To develop an operational plan, create a fail-proof strategic plan, establish clear goals and budgets, define the project scope, create the operational plan, get stakeholders' buy-in, and publish the plan using the right tool.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan is a roadmap designed to implement your business strategies. It operationalizes your strategic plan by defining:

• Vision and objectives behind a strategy.
• Budget and resources required for execution.
• Weekly, monthly and quarterly milestones. 
• Relevant metrics to track progress consistently. 

‎An operational plan clarifies all the finer details about your strategy—like what, who, when and how—to help you realize the bigger vision. It’s a work plan for transferring the available inputs into the desired outputs. 

Operational planning vs. strategic planning

While operational and strategic planning might sound the same, they have significantly different meanings. Let's take a quick look at these differences to understand what an operational plan stacks up against a strategic plan.

5 reasons why you need an operational plan

Only setting goals without a solid operational plan to implement them is like making new year’s resolutions that never come true. 

Without a clear direction of what to do and how, you’d end up wasting your resources with little to no progress to show for it. An operational plan helps move the needle for your company by clarifying the steps to success and bringing more accountability. 

Still wondering how an operational plan can keep you on track? These five benefits will clue you in:

1. Creating an airtight roadmap

If a strategic plan defines the destination, an operational plan chalks out the itinerary to reach that destination. This actionable roadmap covers all bases to streamline collaboration within the team and set up the right systems to hit your milestones. 

2. Attributing roles to all stakeholders

Making an operational plan allows you to assign responsibilities to all internal and external stakeholders. It clarifies who’s responsible for what and sets expectations from the start. This is key for bringing everyone on the same page and avoiding roadblocks once the work is underway. 

3. Tracking progress & making strategic changes

Timelines and milestones are two of the most crucial components of an operational plan in business. They empower teams to analyze their performance and review progress objectively. You can use these insights to tweak your game plan for greater success and to improve operational efficiency .

4. Establishing criteria & metrics for success 

An operational plan outlines the parameters for success and metrics to monitor the same. These metrics give you a clear picture of your progress at every stage to ensure you’re moving as per the plan. They also highlight any potential red flags that can potentially derail the plan and need your attention. 

5. Minimizing discrepancies & errors

One of the most important benefits of making an operational plan is the clarity it brings to everyone. Instead of leaving your team clueless about the next steps, this work plan clarifies how and where they can start. It also reduces errors by laying down the ground rules for every task and process.

📌 ‎ Related resource: Operations Teams: How to Assemble and Lead a High-Performing Team

How to develop an operational plan strategy

There’s no standard rulebook for creating an operational plan. It’s a fully customizable document that depends entirely on your company’s goals, resources, timelines and overall approach. 

For example, a fast-paced team can work with shorter timelines and hit more goals than a large-scale organization with more levels of checks and a bigger hierarchy.  

So, instead of replicating other companies’ operational plans, let’s help you create your own plan with this 6-step process:

• Draw out a fail-proof strategic plan.
• Establish clear goals and budgets.
• Dig deeper into the project scope.
• Create your operational plan.
• Get all stakeholders’ buy-in for the plan.
• Publish the plan using the right tool.

1. Draw out a fail-proof strategic plan

A strategic plan is to an operational plan what a storyline is to a movie—it conveys the essence and creates a direction for the operational plan to become a masterpiece. 

So, naturally, the first step to operational planning is creating a strategic plan; here’s how:

• Define what success looks like for the entire organization. 
• Evaluate organizational readiness to implement this strategy. 
• Take inputs from people in the senior leadership. 
• Assign responsibilities to different stakeholders. 
• Prioritize goals against timelines. 

Once done, you can rely on this strategic plan throughout the operational planning process to prepare for what lies ahead. 

💡 ‎Use these 14 free customizable project plan templates to enhance communication, save time and achieve your strategic planning goals.

2. Establish clear goals & budgets

The next step is breaking your high-level goals into shorter, more actionable objectives. For example, you can divide the goal of achieving an X% growth in revenue into smaller targets, like increasing inbound leads, doubling down on cold outreach and rolling out a referral program. Implementing effective referral tracking within the program will allow you to monitor and optimize the success of your referral initiatives, providing valuable insights into the sources and impact of referred business.

Goal-setting makes your operational plan realistic and feasible. You're ideating the means to realize the long-term vision by hitting the right milestones. 

More importantly, once you have a list of goals, it's easier to determine the budget and resources required to achieve them. Before moving ahead, do your homework to set a solid budget that allows you to implement your strategy without splurging too much. 

3. Dig deeper into the project scope

Once you’re clear about your goals and resources, it’s time to define the finer details of your plan—specifying who’ll do what, when and how. 

Create a comprehensive project scope by outlining:

• Department-wise goals and tasks according to the goals.
• Different stakeholders involved within and outside your company. 
• Responsibilities for each stakeholder with primary KPIs for their role.
• SOPs  and  workflows  to perform a task or complete a process. 

This step brings more specificity to your operational plan. It concretely spells out each goal with details about milestones within each goal, roles and teams responsible for fulfilling these milestones and how they will work toward the end goals. 

💡 ‎ Scribe top tip: Creating a project scope document is a breeze when you use Scribe. You can use Scribe's project scope template to get cracking at the earliest. 

4. Create your operational plan

By this point, you've done all the legwork to get to work and start writing your operational plan finally.

Make it as actionable and value-packed as possible by answering these five main questions:

• Who: People involved in different tasks. Include a list of teams and specific roles involved in the business operations and clarify what’s expected of them. 
• What: Plan of action and targets to pursue. Create a milestone-based roadmap of the high-level goals to achieve and the smaller goals involved in the process. 
• Where: Platform(s) where daily operations will happen. Add all the tools and frameworks you'll use to run business operations through this plan seamlessly. 
• When: Deadlines for different tasks and activities. Map out the timelines for each job to ensure your team is on track for timely completion. 
• ‍ How much: Costs involved in hitting the designated goals. Mention your final budget and resource allocation for different tasks.

Use Scribe's free AI Writer for Operations tool to capture and document operational procedures.

‎Additionally, a good operational plan also lists the metrics to track your progress. Pick and explain relevant metrics in your plan to show employees how you'll analyze their efforts.  ‍

5. Get all stakeholders’ buy-in for the plan

No plan is perfect and there's always scope for improving your operational plan to make it perfect. So, once you've drafted the plan, don't forget to run it by a few select stakeholders to identify the gaps you can cover. 

Actively seek feedback from people in different ranks and departments to understand the missing links in your plan. Your plan will go through 2-3 rounds of iterations before it’s finally ready to roll out. 

6. Publish the plan using the right tool

The final step in the process is publishing the plan. The most important thing to remember is that your plan should be:

• Reader-friendly.
• Easily accessible.
• Quickly shareable. 

Clueless about the best way to hit all three points to roll out your operational plan? We have just the solution you need — Scribe . 

‎Scribe is a documentation tool designed to create intuitive documents, like an operational plan, in a few seconds. It significantly reduces the time spent on creating such documents and improves team efficiency in more ways than one.

‎You can create a single Scribe to explain a process or compile instructions with SOPs in a single place with Pages. You can even ask the AI to write your operational plan — just add a simple prompt and your Scribes, and the AI will build a customized document!

‎It's the easiest way to bring your team on the same page and power up your operations! 

✨ ‎See how operations teams use Scribe to tackle even the most daunting operational challenges.

3 operational plan examples (& why they work)

If you’re looking for some inspiration to get cracking with your planning process, looking at a few operations plan examples can help big time! Let’s look at three great examples, see why they work and how you can replicate the results. 

1. Carter Supply’s risk management plan

This detailed risk management plan by Carter Supply covers several aspects of managing risk at the organization. This 10-page document lists the key components of this plan, like a summary, the approval process and the end-to-end risk management process. 

As an operational plan, it gives the entire team clear insights into the risk management plan, highlights why it’s in place and explains how this plan will be used. 

This plan also covers different aspects of the plan and lays down the process of working on each element. For example, for risk quantification, the plan specifies that the risk manager will work with the risk owner to understand the exposure. 

2. Upscope’s go-to-market plan

Upscope ’s go-to-market (GTM) plan is another excellent example of operational planning. The SaaS company created this plan to execute its strategy for breaking into the co-browsing market. 

Pursuing this goal, the team created an airtight plan with a rundown of its target audience, pain points the product solves and the buyer journey. 

The Upscope marketing and sales teams could use this GTM plan to launch targeted campaigns and reach the right people. They were also well aware of the main value propositions to share with the target buyers, nudging them towards a purchase. 

📌 ‎Related resource: How Product Operations Can Help Your Team Build Better Products 📌 ‎

3. SmartNet’s project quality management plan

The quality management plan by SmartNet is a detailed document explaining the company’s entire operations framework, from the management structure to project reporting, risk assessment, deliverable production and more. 

Instead of a single department, this operational plan documents the complete business operations. Despite being so lengthy, the document is easy to read and understand—exactly how the plan should look like.

It also includes all the critical information to guide new employees about the company's operations from scratch.

Make operational planning your road to success 

When done right, operational planning can be a game-changer for streamlining your operations. It’s an in-depth roadmap to work toward your vision and hit all goals. 

Even though making an operational plan isn’t the most exciting task and it can get extremely time-consuming, the right process and tools can do the trick for you. Follow the six steps we’ve highlighted in this guide and when you’re ready to roll, use Scribe to put the plan in place. 

Scribe takes the pain out of documentation to empower teams for seamless operational planning. Try it today to see how it works!

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Operational Planning: How to Make an Operations Plan

The operations of your business can be defined as the sum of all the daily activities that you and your team execute to create products or services and engage with your customers, among other critical business functions. While organizing these moving parts might sound difficult, it can be easily done by writing a business operational plan. But before we learn how to make one, let’s first understand what’s the relationship between strategic and operational planning.

Operational Planning vs. Strategic Planning

Operational planning and strategic planning are complementary to each other. This is because strategic plans define the business strategy and the long-term goals for your organization, while operational plans define the steps required to achieve them.

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Operational Plan Template

Use this free Operational Plan Template for Word to manage your projects better.

What Is a Strategic Plan?

A strategic plan is a business document that describes the business goals of a company as well as the high-level actions that will be taken to achieve them over a time period of 1-3 years.

What Is an Operational Plan?

Operational plans map the daily, weekly or monthly business operations that’ll be executed by the department to complete the goals you’ve previously defined in your strategic plan. Operational plans go deeper into explaining your business operations as they explain roles and responsibilities, timelines and the scope of work.

Operational plans work best when an entire department buys in, assigning due dates for tasks, measuring goals for success, reporting on issues and collaborating effectively. They work even better when there’s a platform like ProjectManager , which facilitates communication across departments to ensure that the machine is running smoothly as each team reaches its benchmark. Get started with ProjectManager for free today.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of turning strategic plans into action plans, which simply means breaking down high-level strategic goals and activities into smaller, actionable steps. The main goal of operational planning is to coordinate different departments and layers of management to ensure the whole organization works towards the same objective, which is achieving the goals set forth in the strategic plan .

How to Make an Operational Plan

There’s no single approach to follow when making an operation plan for your business. However, there’s one golden rule in operations management : your strategic and operational plans must be aligned. Based on that principle, here are seven steps to make an operational plan.

• Map business processes and workflows: What steps need to be taken at the operations level to accomplish long-term strategic goals?
• Set operational-level goals: Describe what operational-level goals contribute to the achievement of larger strategic goals.
• Determine the operational timeline: Is there any time frame for the achievement of the operational plan?
• Define your resource requirements: Estimate what resources are needed for the execution of the operational plan.
• Estimate the operational budget: Based on your resource requirements, estimate costs and define an operational budget.
• Set a hiring plan: Are there any skills gaps that need to be filled in your organization?
• Set key performance indicators: Define metrics and performance tracking procedures to measure your team’s performance.

Free Operational Plan Template

Leverage everything you’ve learned today with our template. This free operational plan template for Word will help you define your budget, timeline, KPIs and more. It’s the perfect first step in organizing and improving your operations. Download it today.

What Should be Included in an Operational Plan?

Your operational plan should describe your business operations as accurately as possible so that internal teams know how the company works and how they can help achieve the larger strategic objectives. Here’s a list of some of the key elements that you’ll need to consider when writing an operational plan.

Executive Summary

An executive summary is a brief document that summarizes the content of larger documents like business plans, strategic plans or operation plans. Their main purpose is to provide a quick overview for busy stakeholders.

Operational Budget

An operational budget is an estimation of the expected operating costs and revenues for a given time period. As with other types of budget, the operational budget defines the amount of money that’s available to acquire raw materials, equipment or anything else that’s needed for business operations.

It’s important to limit your spending to stay below your operational budget, otherwise, your company could run out of resources to execute its normal activities. You can use our free operating budget template for Excel to track your operating costs.

Operational Objectives

It’s essential to align your operational objectives with your strategic objectives. For example, if one of your strategic objectives is to increase sales by 25 percent over the next three years, one possible operational objective would be to hire new sales employees. You should always grab your strategic plan objectives and turn them into one or multiple action items .

Processes & Workflows

Explain the various business processes, workflows and tasks that need to be executed to achieve your operational objectives. Make sure to explain what resources are needed, such as raw materials, equipment or human resources.

Operational Timeline

It’s important to establish a timeline for your operational plan. In most cases, your operational plan will have the same length as your strategic plan, but in some scenarios, you might create multiple operational plans for specific purposes. Not all operational plans are equal, so the length of your operational timeline will depend on the duration of your projects , workflows and processes.

Hiring Plan

Find any skills gap there might be in your team. You might need to hire a couple of individuals or even create new departments in order to execute your business processes .

Quality Assurance and Control

Most companies implement quality assurance and control procedures for a variety of reasons such as customer safety and regulatory compliance. In addition, quality assurance issues can cost your business millions, so establishing quality management protocols is a key step in operational planning.

Key Performance Indicators

It’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the productivity of your business operations. You can define as many KPIs as needed for all your business processes. For example, you can define KPIs for marketing, sales, product development and other key departments in your company. This can include product launch deadlines, number of manufactured goods, number of customer service cases closed, number of 5-star reviews received, number of customers acquired, revenue increased by a certain percentage and so on.

Risks, Assumptions and Constraints

Note any potential risks, assumptions and time or resource constraints that might affect your business operations.

What Are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

Every plan has a massive effect on all team members involved, and those can be to your company’s benefit or to their detriment. If it’s to their detriment, it’s best to find out as soon as possible so you can modify your operational plan and pivot with ease.

But that’s the whole point of operational planning: you get to see the effect of your operations on the business’s bottom line in real time, or at every benchmark, so you know exactly when to pivot. And with a plan that’s as custom to each department as an operational plan, you know exactly where things go wrong and why.

How ProjectManager Can Help with Operational Planning

Creating and implementing a high-quality operational plan is the best way to ensure that your organization starts out a project on the right foot. ProjectManager has award-winning project management tools to help you craft and execute such a plan.

Gantt charts are essential to create and monitor operational plans effectively. ProjectManager helps you access your Gantt chart online so you can add benchmarks for operational performance reviews. You can also create tasks along with dependencies to make the operation a surefire success.

Whether you’re a team of IT system administrators, marketing experts, or engineers, ProjectManager includes robust planning and reporting tools. Plan in sprints, assign due dates, collaborate with team members and track everything with just the click of a button. Plus, we have numerous ready-made project reports that can be generated instantly, including status reports, variance reports, timesheet reports and more.

Related Operations Management Content

• Operational Strategy: A Quick Guide
• Operations Management: Key Functions, Roles and Skills
• Operational Efficiency: A Quick Guide
• Using Operational Excellence to Be More Productive

Operational planning isn’t done in a silo, and it doesn’t work without the full weight of the team backing it up. Ensure that your department is successful at each benchmark. ProjectManager is an award-winning pm software dedicated to helping businesses smooth out their operational plans for a better year ahead. Sign up for our free 30-day trial today.

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Operational Plan: Everything You Need To Know (2024 Guide)

The old way of planning no longer works in complex and unpredictable business environments, and companies are struggling to find their feet on shaky ground. As we’ve seen with many of our customers and strategies in Cascade, organizations can no longer count on executing three or even five-year strategic plans.

The new reality forces companies and their operations teams to adapt their operational plans more frequently and within shorter time frames if they want to reap benefits faster than their competitors. Organizations need to work on their strategic instinct and fast adaptability to enhance their operational efficiency .  

And that requires big changes—including building a flexible operational plan, supported by the right tools and systems that help you achieve real-time centralized observability and empower a strategic response to external disruptions.

Read this article to build a bulletproof operational plan that includes all the key elements necessary to overcome unpredictable business chaos. You’ll also get free templates that will help you rapidly adapt and align your teams.

✨Bonus: We’ve included pro tips from business leaders in our network to help you identify gaps in your strategy execution and build resilient business operations.

What Is An Operational Plan?

An operational plan is action and detail-oriented; it needs to focus on short-term strategy execution and outline an organization's day-to-day operations. If your operations strategy is a promise, your operational plan is the action plan for how you will deliver on it every day, week, and month.

Put simply, an operational plan helps you bridge the gap between business strategy and on-the-ground execution and ensures that the organization is on track to achieve its long-term goals.

Benefits of operational planning

• Clear definition of relationships between cross-functional teams in different departments and responsibilities for each to eliminate duplicated efforts.
• Tighter alignment between corporate or business unit strategic plans and on-the-ground execution, helping the organization meet its business targets.
• Strong operating system that enables the company to quickly adapt, deliver operations goals, and monitor performance.

Operational planning vs. strategic planning

Operational planning deals with the day-to-day details and short-term goals, while strategic planning focuses on the big picture and long-term direction of an organization.

To put it in simpler terms, operational planning is about the "how" of daily tasks, while strategic planning defines the "what" and "why" for future success.

📚Recommended reading: Strategic vs. Operational Planning

Kickstart Your Operational Planning Process: Lay The Foundation

The quality of your operational plan will depend on your input. A successful operational planning initiative will consider these aspects:

• Who will be involved? Identify and include employees, customers, and the management team in the planning process to gain valuable insights from the front lines, ensuring better strategy and execution buy-in.
• What are your internal capabilities? Assess internal capabilities by conducting an internal analysis , including resource requirements, operating budget, and talent skills. Talent management and employee engagement are just a few of the many challenges that COOs will have on their operations agenda.
• What environment are you operating in? Conduct an external analysis (e.g., PESTLE or Porter’s 5 Forces ) to inform your approach and identify optimization opportunities and risks, keeping you agile in a changing market.
• Is it aligned with your organization’s strategy? Ensure alignment of your operational plan with your organization’s strategic plan to actively support the company's long-term vision and contribute to key business metrics.

👉🏻 Once you’ve gathered this information, you can develop an operational plan to help you execute business strategies.

Key Elements Of Your Operational Plan

Enough chit-chat; it’s time to put your operational plan together. We've built this based on our proven and tested approach, used by over +45,000 Cascade users.

See how Cascade Strategy Execution Platform enhances operational efficiency by reducing duplication and aligning teams toward common goals. It effectively eliminates waste resulting from misalignment, fostering smoother operations and improved performance.

Here’s a recap of the five key elements your plan must consider:

Choose key metrics aligned with the company goals

Selecting your operational plan's key metrics isn't a mere exercise in tracking numbers; it's about laser-focused alignment with your business needs and objectives. These metrics are the tangible indicators of your organization's efficiency and performance. They serve as the compass, guiding your daily decisions and actions toward achieving concrete results.

By precisely aligning these metrics with your company's core objectives, you ensure that every initiative and action within your operational plan directly contributes to achieving tangible results.

An aligned operational plan makes it easier to:

• Communicate roles and responsibilities to all employees so they know how their efforts contribute to overall business success.
• Identify and address operational bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could derail strategy execution.
• Motivate and engage employees to work toward strategic objectives and deliver on business outcomes.

Remember that the role of operations is to close the gap between your organization's strategic goals and what is being done on a daily basis to make them happen.

👉🏻 How Cascade can help:

With Cascade’s Metrics Library , you can bring your operating and financial business-level goals together with your strategy under one single roof. This makes reporting & governance easy, accurate, and less time-consuming by connecting your business data to your key business initiatives.

Through Cascade’s integrations , you can consolidate your metrics in one place, importing your data directly from business systems, data lakes, BI tools, or even spreadsheets.

Define the focus areas of your operational plan

The focus areas of your operational plan are the key areas of the business that the plan will address.

This will depend on your business plan. Think about how the business operates and how it succeeds. Do you need to pursue short-term cost reductions while simultaneously pursuing longer-term growth and transformation initiatives? Your operational plans must be built on these strategic priorities.

For example, you can prioritize your focus areas based on the most relevant business strategies or by specific departments. Some examples of focus areas could be:

• Administration
• Human Resources

💡Tips to help define the focus areas of your operational plan:

• Identify the business's key challenges and opportunities.
• Consider the business's overall long-term strategy and key metrics and how the operational plan's focus areas can support these objectives.
• Bring other people on board to help you identify what needs to be addressed by the operations plan.

Create strategic objectives for your operational plan

Strategic objectives are specific goals aligned with the operation’s strategy and focus areas. They represent what you want to achieve in each focus area and will serve as the building blocks of your plan, ensuring that it’s focused and actionable.

Some examples of strategic objectives:

• Reduce costs by 10% within the next year by implementing more efficient processes and streamlining the supply chain over the next year.
• Launch three new products in the next fiscal year to expand your product lines and increase revenue.
• Increase customer satisfaction scores by 5% within the next six months.

💡Tips for defining strategic objectives include:

• Ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
• Consistently align objectives with your operational plan's focus areas and the company's goals.
• Don’t be afraid to get input from other people about your objectives.

Identify and prioritize projects

It’s time to identify and prioritize the projects that need to be executed. Remember, projects are action plans to help you achieve your strategic objectives.

Project planning should include thinking about time frames, task assignments, and deliverables (and prioritizing).

Here are some examples of project ideas:

• Localize sourcing for critical semi-finished materials.
• Streamline the supply chain to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Find and develop an alternative logistics channel.
• Implement a new customer service training program to improve customer satisfaction scores.
• Implement a new technology that will enable end-to-end supply chain visibility.

💡Tips for defining and prioritizing projects:

• Identify the specific actions and activities needed to achieve each strategic objective.
• Prioritize the projects based on their importance, feasibility, and potential impact on the business.
• Involve stakeholders in defining and prioritizing the projects to ensure their needs and concerns are heard.

Identify and track key performance indicators (KPIs)

Finally, you’ll need to know if your operational plan and day-to-day activities result in outcomes.

Set KPIs for key initiatives and strategic objectives to measure success, ensure alignment, and identify performance gaps in your operational plan.

Some examples of operations KPIs are:

• Inventory costs
• Costs of goods sold
• Revenue growth
• Employee retention rate
• Customer satisfaction score

💡Tips for defining and tracking KPIs:

• Align KPIs with your strategic objectives and focus areas so that you can track the plan's progress against these specific goals.
• Add both lagging and leading indicators .
• Instead of using multiple disconnected spreadsheets and project management tools, consider live dashboards or reporting systems to track the KPIs and monitor progress over time.

👉🏻 How Cascade can help build your plan:

Cascade’s planner feature enables you to build your operational plan with structure and ease by breaking down the complexity from high-level initiatives to executable outcomes. Define your key elements (focus areas, objectives, projects, and KPIs), and share the plan with your teams. You’ll get full visibility of the plan’s progress in real-time, allowing you to identify gaps, quickly update the plan, and communicate the change with your team with a single click.

👉🏻 If you don’t want to start building the plan from scratch, use our free Operational Plan Template pre-filled with examples of focus areas, objectives, projects, and KPIs that you can customize to meet your organization’s needs.

Operational Plan Examples & Templates

Here are five operational plan examples to help you create plans for your teams. You can use one master operational plan or set up an operational plan for each department.

Master Operational Plan Example

This Operational Plan Template will help you close the gap between business goals and day-to-day operations. You'll be able to set goals and KPIs for your top priorities and work with the operations team to deliver operational excellence and business results.

HR Plan Example

This HR Operational Plan Template can be used to meet staffing requirements, manage human capital and align human resources activities with your strategy. HR managers in any industry can create a clear operational plan that can be constantly monitored, adapted, and improved.

IT Plan Example

If you’re in the IT team, try out this IT Plan Template to get your IT operational planning up and running fast. It comes prefilled with focus areas and KPIs relevant to IT operations; you can easily customize workflows and deliverables to your needs.

Marketing Plan Example

This Marketing Plan Template can help you efficiently understand and plan your digital marketing operations using best practices. Use it to quickly set up priorities and get your social media and marketing teams moving on tasks that will make an impact.

Finance Plan Example

This finance-focused template is ideal if you want to get on top of your finance operations plan. Use it to allocate and distribute financial resources across your organization and get real-time updates through your dashboard and reports—which are great tools to create a visually compelling financial summary that clearly shows your key metrics.

💡Pro Tip: To ensure successful execution, it's crucial to align not just your master operational plan with your overarching strategic plan, but also all the operational department plans.

With the Alignment Maps feature, you’ll be able to visualize how your top-level business strategy breaks down into functional and operational plans. This empowers COOs and CFOs to consolidate their operational plans in one place, creating tighter alignment between the finance and operations teams and improving cross-collaboration to build more resilient operations.

Want to dig deeper? Use the Relationships feature to see the relationships between connected objectives from your plans and understand how your different department goals contribute to the core business metrics and goals. This view will allow you to clearly map dependencies, blockers, and risks that may lie along your journey.

5 Tips For An Effective Operational Plan And Its Execution

1. don’t underestimate the power of transparent communication.

Regularly communicate the operational plan and progress to all relevant stakeholders to build the necessary buy-in and support. Your employees must know your goals and the roadmap, and team members should understand their role in its execution. This business transparency will help everyone row in the same direction.

“Clarity regarding strategy is one of the key drivers of autonomous execution. If people understand what you’re working toward and have guardrails in place, they can be empowered to make their own decisions and don’t need everything to be ‘run up the chain’ to get approved. This allows you to move fast and at scale.” — Sam Sterling , Chief Strategy Officer, Akqa

2. Keep moving forward and adopt a growth mindset

Keep the momentum going and ensure that the plan is executed effectively. Regular monitoring and reviews can help identify and address any challenges or obstacles that may arise.

Schedule regular reviews and check-ins and provide the necessary support to ensure projects are on track and moving forward.

“I think adopting a growth mindset is super important. This means having the confidence to fail fast, try something new and empower people to do that.” — Ken Miller , General Manager, Azure Intelligent Cloud at Microsoft

With the Team Updates functionality, every team member can post updates on key measures, actions, and objectives. This will give you real-time visibility into performance and help you identify possible risks before it’s too late—without having to schedule extra meetings or nag your team members for updates.

3. Make strategic moves and change fast when you need to

Your operational plan should be flexible, adaptable, and open to adjustments. This means keeping an eye on progress, making corrections if needed, and being willing to adapt the plan to changing circumstances or new opportunities. As McKinsey suggests, you can consider creating a team that will be able to collect data, link analysis with action, and offer quick responses to rapid changes.

“Traditionally, companies would have taken that piece of paper and gone out and said: we're going to execute it, start to finish. Then get into the formulation of the strategy, what we need to hit, and what the end product result will be like. But what we do know is that’s never the case. Along the way, you're going to have bumps, and inevitably, you’ll need to change from that original picture.” — Annie Lucchitti , Marketing Manager, Unilever

4. Empower your operations team and boost efficiency

Effective operational planning requires the engagement and empowerment of your team. Involve stakeholders in the planning process and provide them with the necessary resources. Give them context and an opportunity to set goals and prioritize initiatives. This will help you boost engagement and hold them accountable for progress.

“I think it just works at every single level. Are people allowed to be themselves at work? Personally, are they at peace? Are they happy? Productivity happens when people have the right skills, but also when they are engaged and happy. If one of those fails a bit, productivity will start decreasing.” — Joan Torrents , Global Sourcing Manager, TESCO.

5. If it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed

Don’t underestimate the importance of tracking and measuring progress against the operational plan's goals and objectives. Set milestones, enforce KPIs, and stay on top of progress. Doing this will help you stay on course, empower you to act quickly, and provide valuable insights into what is going wrong.

“Data is a foundational element in the strategy definition phase as well as in the strategy execution phase as it helps create a baseline, identify key priorities, set goals, and measure progress.” — Erica Santoni , Principal, Diversity Equity & Inclusion, Intuit

Use Cascade’s Dashboards to monitor your day-to-day progress on key metrics and critical business and strategic information in real-time.

Compile the information in powerful reports and executive summaries in seconds with pre-built templates. Share them with your key stakeholders —internal and external— and invite them to collaborate on your strategy together.

Execute Your Operational Plan With Cascade 🚀

What good is an operational plan if no one executes it? If your organization wants to operate at a higher level, static tools like Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, Google Docs, and/or project management tools aren’t the solution.

❌They aren’t designed for adaptive strategy and planning.

❌They often lead to siloing and hinder effective cross-collaboration.

❌They make it challenging to measure progress and slow down decision-making.

With Cascade as your central operating system, you can stop running business operations blindfolded and embrace rapid, coordinated, and data-driven decision-making.

Get your Operational Plan Template to get started with a dynamic plan that will lead to actual outcomes for your business and see faster results from your strategy.

Or take Cascade for a spin! Start today for free or book a 1:1 product tour with Cascade’s in-house strategy expert.

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