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Frequently Asked Questions

Question

How do you develop an annual operating plan?

Answer

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Upon completion of the strategic plan, an operating plan for the upcoming year must be prepared. An operating plan is a schedule of events and responsibilities that details the actions to be taken in order to accomplish the goals and objectives laid out in the strategic plan. An organization should have annual operating plans that corresponds to its fiscal year for each major organizational unit. The plan ensures everyone knows what needs to get done, coordinates their efforts when getting it done, and can keep close track of whether and how it got done.

Imagine you are driving a car on a camping vacation. It is important to have a destination in mind -- your "long-range goal." The destination alone, however, is not enough to get you there successfully. You need to have detailed instructions about which roads to take, when to make turns, estimated distance and time, where you can stop for food and gas, gauges that tell you how much gas you have in your tank, and warning systems to tell you if the engine gets overheated.

Now imagine that you are not driving the car alone, but instead you have twenty people doing different jobs simultaneously: your organization's executive director is at the steering wheel with a couple of board members looking over his or her shoulder, but four others are at each of the wheels making them spin; other people are looking out each window, reporting what they see to the driver, and someone else is in the back making sandwiches. It is going to take an impressive plan to move this crew in the same direction.

This is the stuff of operating plans: which programs and management functions are going to do what, by when, and how much "gas" (money and person power) it will require. This level of detail is unnecessary in a strategic plan itself -- in fact, it would clutter up the presentation of the long-range vision: the strategic plan focuses on the swimming hole at the camp you are going to, not which gas station to stop at along the way.

Characteristics of an Effective Annual Operating Plan

There are three important attributes to good operating plan:

an appropriate level of detail -- enough to guide the work, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming, confusing, or unnecessarily constrains creativity
a format that allows for periodic reports on progress toward the specific goals and objectives
a structure that coincides with the strategic plan -- the goal statements for the strategic plan and the operating plan are one and the same; the objective statements for the strategic plan and the operating plan will be different.

Just as monthly financial statements often present a budget for revenues and expenses and then report actual figures for a given time period, so should operating plans allow for the same type of comparison: the plan declares the "budgeted" work in terms of goals and objectives for each program area and management function, and reports the actual progress on a monthly or, perhaps, quarterly basis. This "budget-to-actual" report gives a clear reading on how the "trip" is going.