Rory sat at his desk, adding machine with paper tape streaming to the floor.

“What’s up?” I said, breaking his concentration.

“Oh, man. I have to put a budget together, never had to do this before. I don’t even know where to start.”

“Where does any plan start?” I asked.

“In class, you said, we start with vision, painting a vivid picture of the future, but this is a budget. This is all numbers.” Rory was bordering on whining.

“You still start at the same place,” I said. “The first step is visualization. You have to imagine the colorful detail, the heat of the moment, the status of success, problems solved and the new capacities. It is only when you have a very clear picture of the future that you will remember the detail for all the things that go into the budget.”

The wheels were already turning. I was losing Rory in his own imagination. His eyes were tracing images of this picture inside his mind.

“The more detail in your vision, the more likely you will imagine the resources required to create that picture.” I backed out of the room. Rory was on his way.

Lucinda was impatient. “I have been waiting for a promotion from Project Assistant to Project Manager for some time now. My manager has put my promotion off for the past six months. I worked hard, attended workshops, gained the confidence of clients. In my review this past week, my manager again said I needed to wait, that I wasn’t ready. As a Project Assistant, I do the work of a Project Manager, but get none of the credit.”

“So, what are the reasons that your Manager feels you need to wait?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He just tells me I need to wait, a bit more training, perhaps, but I have been through training.”

“Lucinda, does your company have other Project Managers?”

“Yes.”

“And what kind of projects do they handle?” I was probing. There must be some reason for Lucinda’s manager to hesitate on this promotion.

“Well, they handle larger projects, but they have more experience. They had to start somewhere when they were young.” Lucinda protested. I smiled as I watched her stand up for herself.

“Lucinda, I want you to do a couple of things. First, I need you to take a longer view of this. I know you want to become a Project Manager in the next three days, but I want you to imagine your career three years from now.” Lucinda nodded. She didn’t like what I had to say, but she nodded. “It is likely that three years from now, you will have been a Project Manager for some time, probably handling larger projects than you handle now. I don’t want you to focus on the next three days. I want you to focus on the next three years and begin to map out a course for the kind of Project Manager you want to be then.

“Next, I want you to spend some time with other Project Managers in your company. You said they all had to start somewhere. Find out how they started. Find out about their first projects. Find out what skills they see as most valuable during their careers. Ask one of them to be your coach.

“Then, go back to your manager and ask his help in mapping out a three year plan to become a Project Manager. Tell him you know you will be promoted, and whenever that is, will be fine, but that you are looking further into the future at what kind of Project Manager you will be in three years. Ask what areas you need to work on, what future skills you need to develop.

“Lucinda, you will get your promotion, maybe in the next three weeks, maybe in the next three months. Look further in the future, that’s where the real payoff is. What kind of Project Manager will you be three years from now?”

It’s business planning season. It’s our focus at Working Leadership Online. It’s a focus in my executive groups.

“I drew names out of the hat, and you are going first,” I said.

“But, I have never done this before,” Thed resisted.

“That’s why you are known as fresh meat and believe me, the rest of the group will appreciate that you volunteered to go first.” This week, Thed is scheduled to present his 2010 Business Plan to an executive group he belongs to.

“Thed, here is how it works. Make 15 copies of this 4-page plan. Everyone gets 2 minutes to read your plan. You then get 10 minutes to present additional information to fill in the details.

“At the end of your presentation, I will break the group into three person teams. They get 90 seconds to write down three questions about your business plan.

“Then, I let them loose on you for the next 20 minutes. It will be painful, but it may be your most valuable strategic exercise of the year. Any questions?”

If you want to truly get something valuable out of this planning process, grab a group of your colleagues and let them poke holes in your business plan. The feedback will be priceless.

And if you want a copy of that 4-page Planning Template, it’s on the home page of the blog. Let me know if you have questions.

“Why is Vision so important in the planning process?” I asked.

Brent was thinking, but the answer wasn’t coming to him.

“How excited does your team get over the goals you set?” I continued.

“Well, it’s work. How excited can you get about work?” Brent replied.

“Exactly. So, what’s the one thing in your plan that your team can get excited about?”

Brent closed his eyes, then opened, nodding, “The vision.”

“And that’s why the vision is so important. It’s the only part of your plan that creates energy, entices people, engages people. Goals are nice, but that’s not where the electricity is.”

Miriam crept into the conference room so as not to disturb the rest of the meeting. Everyone was working hard on their business plan for 2010. “I’m having a bit of trouble,” she said. “I know all the steps for the plan, but I am just stuck.”

“What have you done so far?” I asked.

“Step one was the purpose. We know the focus for the project, what problems it is supposed to solve. Then, I created the vision. And that was easy. I think I got it all captured in a couple of sentences. It’s the rest of the plan that I am having difficulty with.”

“Interesting,” I replied, “that you can capture the detail of your vision in two sentences.”

“Well, you are right,” Miriam confessed. “There isn’t a lot of detail, but I thought it would be better if it was short.”

“Miriam, here is the way the vision part of the plan works. The more detailed it is, the clearer the images are, the easier it is to write the rest of the plan. Instead of two sentences, write two pages. I want to know who your customers are and what services you provide. You probably have more than one customer segment, tell me how they are different and how your services to each are different? Tell me what position you hold in the marketplace, what your market share is? Who are your competitors? Tell me what your competitive advantage is, what are your core competencies? Who are your key personnel, how do you find them, how do you grow them? Tell me about your facilities, your plant? How do you control quality? How do you guarantee performance?”

“We need to put a plan together,” Karlyn declared. “Let’s meet in the conference room and set some goals.”

“Sounds great,” I replied. “But what are you going to set the goals for? I need to know a few things before we get to setting goals.”

“Like what?” she pushed back.

“Karlyn, do you remember that multi-track project last summer. You had five teams working on simultaneous tasks for two months. In the end, you were missing two major pieces, but you had used up all your budget. Two of the teams went off on a tangent and created stuff that turned out to be useless.”

Karlyn went silent. “I was lucky I didn’t get fired over that one,” she finally admitted.

“What went wrong?” I asked.

“We never clearly understood the purpose of the project and spent a lot of time and money on things that didn’t matter.”

“And why didn’t you understand the purpose of the project?” I pushed.

“I guess we were moving so fast that we didn’t stop and ask. We knew it was a fast track project with tight deadlines, but we didn’t go slow enough to make sure everything we did was necessary.”

“And how do you know if something is necessary?”

“That’s why we have to define the purpose for the project. Before we can set goals, we have to make sure we understand the purpose.”

Lots of response to this morning’s blog post about My 2010 Business Plan, our current Subject Area at Working Leadership Online.

Sometimes as Managers, we talk out of both sides of our mouth. We understand the benefits of planning, but we also have a litany of excuses why we don’t plan more often. Over the last 15 years, we have created a bullet-proof planning model that blows away the excuses. And if you are willing to do the work, we will share this model with you for FREE.

If you have a manager (or if that manager is YOU), that would benefit from using this process, follow this link to get a Free Trial to Working Leadership Online.

Your Free Trial membership is good through January 31, 2010. It includes full access to our online learning platform. In this Subject Area, you will:

• Understand why planning is important and where it can be useful.
• Understand what prevents us from planning more often.
• Understand a model of planning that helps us be more effective in planning.
• Create a 2010 Business Plan.

We are holding only a limited number of slots for this Free Trial. Looking forward to seeing you online.

From Working Leadership Online.

In our most recent Field Work assignment, we are working on My 2010 Business Plan. Part of the work is creating the plan. The other part is the conversations around the plan.

Question:
This is going to be a tough assignment. We are just a division of a larger parent company that doesn’t have a digestible business plan to subordinate our plans to.

Response:
The fact that your parent company does not have a digestible plan is not unusual. And it does make it tough to understand the context for your plan. And that’s the point, to examine these deficiencies and make some improvement. If you are the only person in the company to create a plan for your team inside of a department inside of a division inside of a parent company, then we have made one small step toward improvement. And the biggest result of this planning effort will be in your team and your department. And YOU will be a more effective manager for it.