Business Plan Development

Welcome to the Business Planning Series! You will learn here how to prepare a Business Plan, perform Key Analyses for Business Planning and how to Prepare the Implementation of a Business Plan.

Preparing a Business Plan

Consider three people in three very different business situations. Harriet manages a long-established sporting goods chain that wants to expand into new markets but lacks capital. Evan has big plans for his IT startup but hasn't yet attracted the investment he needs.

Laura heads a hardware retailer's Marketing Department, which is in need of a change of direction. The one thing they all have in common is they would benefit from creating a business plan.

With a business plan, Harriet should be able to persuade her company's bank to approve a loan that will enable her operation to grow. Similarly, Evan could use a business plan to persuade investors to get on board.

And Laura could use a plan to persuade senior management to allow her to overhaul the department, making it more effective. In each instance, an effective business plan can contribute toward making the business prosper.

There are many important reasons to create a business plan. If your business is just starting out, business plans can help you attract investors. For new and established businesses alike, business plans map out how they'll negotiate opportunities and challenges.

At a departmental level, business plans are developed to address medium-term planning needs and to secure approval and resources from senior management for new ideas and initiatives.

This course will help you develop your own business plan. It starts with an introduction to business plans that illustrates the benefits of business planning and describes the main elements of a plan.

It continues on to discuss the six preparatory steps you should take before developing a business plan and provide examples of each of these steps. And finally, it details how you can create your own plan by following a number of key guidelines.

Performing Key Analyses

Organizations have always had to plan for the future. Currently, however, the ability to develop and implement strategic plans is more important than ever. Managers need to look at the big picture to better understand what will and won't work for their companies. They must determine where potential obstacles might exist, and how a proposed initiative – no matter how big or small – would support a company's vision and objectives.

Say you want to plan your department's future activities to support your organization's strategic objectives. What would a good business plan look like? It should include a thorough review of the internal and external environment to determine how your idea fits in the business and market contexts.

An internal analysis examines your organization's strengths and weaknesses. An external analysis tries to anticipate opportunities and threats in the political, economic, societal, and technological environment – for instance, a PEST analysis. You need to conduct internal and external analyses regularly. This will help promote creativity, uncover opportunities and challenges, and ensure a more effective review process.

This course looks at how to use internal and external analyses of your company to guide you in developing business plans. An internal analysis involves assessing your company's market strategy and resources, evaluating organization and management strategy, and evaluating your organization's financial position. You'll then learn about the factors to consider when analyzing your external environment. This includes a PEST analysis and scenario planning. You'll then learn how to conduct a SWOT analysis of your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Preparing for Implementation

As a manager, you'll probably need to create business plans from time to time. For example, you may want to set out the strategies your department will follow for the next 12 months.

Or you might need to develop a plan for a new product, service, or process. Although creating a successful business plan is a significant achievement, implementing it effectively is not without its challenges.

Implementing a business plan requires the development of action plans. It also involves assigning responsibility for carrying out the necessary actions to individual employees and departments.

You should review and evaluate the results achieved on an ongoing basis. If things go wrong and you don't get the expected results, it's important to be able to modify your plans and take corrective action to get back on track.

In this course, you'll learn how to coordinate and manage all implementation-related activities in an effective way. You'll discover how to develop action plans to help you implement your strategies and ideas.

And you'll find out how to ensure your implementation efforts can be supported in your organization. You'll also determine how to create a reporting system to help you monitor progress, how to control and modify your action plans, and how to assess the resulting outcomes.

After taking this course, you should be in a better position to implement your business plans effectively. This can help you achieve your own goals as a manager – as well as support your organization's strategic objectives.

That’s it! Now go ahead and hit that “Take this course!” button and see you on the inside!