Master Operational Planning for Achieving Business Success

In the next five years, we'll dominate the Middle East, make a profit of 100 billion dollars, and open 50 stores nationwide.

Ambitious company goals like this sometimes intimidate business managers, operational leaders and strategic planners into thinking that they are unachievable; especially if the company doesn't have a track record of achieving significant financial feats.

Thankfully, through operational planning, you can improve your company's chances of achieving its long-term strategic goals.

Read this article to get details on how to quickly create an effective operational plan.

What Is an Operational Plan?

An operational plan is drawn to guide a business's operations for the short term, mostly six to 12 months, and its main objective is to make long-term strategic goals actionable and achievable.

It takes into account timelines, resources and the budget. This usually includes the effort of an entire team, department and stakeholders. This all-hands-on-deck approach to operational planning reduces the chances of misalignment with the company's goals, oversight, and incorrect timelines and increases transparency.

Difference Between Strategic Planning and Operational Planning

A strategic plan is a document that describes a company's mission, vision and goal for the next three to five years. It broadly describes what a company stands for and where it sees itself in the long term. It doesn't include details on how these goals and objectives are to be achieved; instead, it paints a big and sometimes vague picture of the direction a company wants to take.

On the other hand, an operation plan gives details on how a company's strategic plan will be achieved. It gives a detailed plan of action, segments these actions and tasks into timelines, assigns them to the necessary staff and establishes KPIs to monitor the progress of each team.

Simply put, strategic planning is the process of creating long-term company goals. In contrast, operational planning is the process of creating a guide to help a company achieve its strategic goals.

Why Your Company Needs a Business Operational Plan

Here are some of the reasons why your company should have an operational plan:

Clarifies Strategic Goals

Without an operational plan, the company might find itself working in circles and not achieving its long-term strategic goals. Therefore, an operation plan helps executives, managers and heads of departments to define the daily, weekly and daily tasks of their junior colleagues and makes sure that they're aligned with the company's long-term goals.

Not only this, but an operational plan clearly defines how the tasks of individual team members contribute to the overall achievement of the company's goals. That way, team members have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities and how they directly impact the company's vision and mission. This alignment is crucial for business process optimization, as it ensures that every task is strategically designed to enhance operational efficiency and overall business performance.

Boosts Team Productivity

A company with highly productive workers tends to have a 21% increase in profits. [1] And having an operational business plan is an indirect way to boost team productivity.

When individual team members have clearly defined tasks, KPIs and timelines that come with an operational plan, they tend to feel more productive. These clearly defined tasks give them a sense of responsibility for the overall growth. This also makes them more inclined to help and support other team members.

Increases Efficiency

When created, an operational plan generally increases the efficiency of daily operations. This is because it provides clear metrics to identify the employee or department that is doing better, the procedures that seem to achieve quicker and better results and the methods that are not doing so well. It also reduces downtime and delays and prevents bottlenecks and waste.

Enhances Decision-Making

Since an operational plan defines tasks, timelines and responsibilities, it guides a company's decision-making process. It defines measurable KPIs that, in turn, provide data and insight into the business's progress. Managers and executives can then use these insights to quickly make consistent decisions with a low error rate.

Increases Organizational Profitability

A company that has clearly defined goals, a breakdown of the tasks to help achieve those goals, a productive staff to work, an efficient operation, and guidelines to enhance speedy and accurate decision-making is headed for the skies in terms of profitability. Not only this, but an operational plan also helps to improve the communication link between senior and junior colleagues and enables accountability, which in turn positively impacts the revenue and profits of your company.

Factors to Consider Before Creating a Business Operational Plan

Now, let's review some essential factors that need to be considered before developing a business operational plan.

6 Steps to Create an Effective Business Operational Plan

Here are six practical steps to follow while creating an operational plan:

Step 1: Understand the Company’s Strategic Plan

As also highlighted earlier, before creating an operational plan, you first have to understand the goals and objectives outlined in the company's strategic goal. This helps in the prioritization of different activities and also gives you an idea of which departments to allocate each task and which individual team member is better suited for a particular task, etc.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

If your company has a lot of staff, then you might not be able to tell by heart the employee to assign each task; you can use software like Atlas UP to analyze your company data, assess your team's workload chart and determine the best department or employee for a job.

Our platform works like Chatgpt; the difference is that it provides real-time answers about anything related to your company. It can quickly provide specific answers into the current workload of any of your employees, the last time any of them took a vacation, and any other specific answers you want to know.

Step 2: Formulate Operational Strategies

One basic way to come up with strategies for your operational plan is by brainstorming. Here, you can engage executives and stakeholders, hire consultants, or even include employees. This will help you generate unique ideas and approaches that will help you achieve your targets.

You can use the SWOT analysis to evaluate each strategy to ensure that it is both feasible and aligns with your goals. Hence, for you to approve the use of a strategy, make sure that it capitalizes on the company's strengths. This will help increase your chances of success and efficiency. Also, ensure that any weaknesses that come with the strategies are improved upon.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

Atlas UP is an AI tool designed to support you with research and content creation. Unlike generic AI tools, Atlas UP understands your company’s mission, vision, and values, allowing it to tailor its responses to what matters most to your organization.

When your company needs quick and accurate data analysis, Atlas UP can efficiently summarize your strategic plan and highlight its key points. It goes a step further by suggesting strategies that align with your long-term goals and company values.

By focusing on the core principles that drive your business, Atlas UP provides precise insights and actionable recommendations, enabling you to make informed decisions that support your company's mission and vision.

Step 3: Create Action Plans

To create an action plan, pick a particular strategy and divide it into processes. Then, choose a process and gather information about it, such as the following:

• The steps involved in the process
• The department that's supposed to handle the steps
• The job titles of the individuals that will be responsible for each step
• A projection of the resources that will be needed to complete each step
• Measurable KPIs
• An achievable timeline

You can involve department heads and managers for accurate details while creating action plans. Don't forget to clearly define possible issues, delays and bottlenecks that might occur while executing each action plan; that way, you can make provisions to prevent them from happening or start providing solutions if they're inevitable.

By creating an action plan, you're creating a visual sequence of activities that make the targets seem achievable, highlight the workflow, and also reveal intra-department collaborations that will help speed up the process.

How Can Atlas UP help?

Atlas UP can significantly enhance your operational planning by hosting your department's process files and providing a cohesive AI interface for engaging with this content. When integrated with your company’s data, Atlas UP allows you to interact and query the processes being developed. It can identify cross-organizational opportunities, interface with existing systems, and highlight potential conflicts and risks. This ensures that your operational planning is efficient, data-driven, and aligned with your strategic goals.

Step 4: Estimate and Allocate the Operational Budget

When estimating your budget, make sure you only quote realistic figures based on your actual costs and the proposed revenue. To do this, you have to determine the actual cost of direct expenses. For instance, if your company sells physical products, then the cost of direct expenses will include the cost of goods sold, manufacturing materials, labor, shipping and handling, etc.

After that, you need to include your operating cost. This usually involves fixed expenses such as rental fees, software tool subscriptions, salaries, insurance coverage, etc. You also have to consider variable expenses such as advertising and marketing costs, office supplies, consultant fees, etc.

Importantly, don't forget to allocate some money to unexpected expenses because no matter how well you create an operational plan, there are bound to be expenses that you didn't plan for. To accurately create a realistic operational budget, you might need the help of heads of various departments or an accurate record of the company's past expenses.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

Atlas UP can do complex math for you based on the policies, processes, procedures, and content you have shared with it. By integrating with your company’s data, Atlas UP provides financial insights to help you develop an accurate operational plan budget. It can reference historical spending on previous and similar projects, allowing you to quickly iterate, role-play, and explore various scenarios in developing budgets and financials for your strategic planning. This capability ensures that your operational planning is efficient, data-driven, and aligned with your strategic goals.

Step 5: Set a Hiring Plan and Process

At this stage, you need to figure out the skills gaps that you need to achieve your operational goals. First, you have to evaluate the capabilities of your current workforce and identify the gaps that can be filled through recruitment. Make sure that these to-be-filled positions will directly or indirectly impact the success of your operational plan.

Other than this, collect information on the number of new hires that are needed and how much it will take to hire and retain people in those roles. Collaborate with executives and heads of departments to determine the best timeline to fill each position. Don't forget to ask them to give you a detailed job description and qualifications of the ideal candidate.

Also, you might want to implement an applicant tracking system to help you screen candidates and assess all resumes from one dashboard. You can source for top talents from social media platforms, job boards, freelance platforms, recruitment agencies or employee referrals.

Always have a detailed screening process in place to sieve out more candidates after the ATS has done the first screening round. This could be a skills and knowledge test, sample projects, personality tests, or whatever assessment that will help you pick the best candidate. Moreover, define an interview strategy, outline the process and plan an effective onboarding strategy to get the best candidates for the job.

How Can Atlas UP Help with Hiring and Planning?

Atlas UP provides you with quick and easy access to comprehensive information about personnel, salaries, and raise schedules across various departments and divisions within your organization. This capability allows you to efficiently compare industry and market standards for different roles, supporting your hiring and planning processes. By leveraging this data, you can identify candidates who are not only qualified but also fit within the constraints of your current organizational structure.

With Atlas UP, you can perform real-time analysis of your organization and get answers to questions that would otherwise be challenging or impossible to extract from your HR systems. Whether you need to understand salary distributions, compare compensation packages, or analyze raise schedules, Atlas UP delivers the insights you need promptly and accurately.

Step 6: Determine the Operational Timeline

Without a timeline, it might take your company months to achieve a goal that would have been achieved in two weeks. To this end, an operational timeline serves as a roadmap to guide the daily activities of the company. It also enables the identification of delays and allows for timely adjustment so that the company can stay on course in achieving its long-term goals.

To determine an operational timeline, you need to clearly outline the steps and processes involved in the achievement of each target, the available resources, priority tasks and a record of how long it takes to complete each task.

You can determine this estimation by consulting internal or external experts for insights. They'll also point out potential issues with the strategies you determined in the step two above and give pointers to help your company religiously follow your operational plan.

Don't forget to allow extra time to deal with unforeseen events, risks or execution because they are inevitable. This flexibility will allow your company to adjust and adapt to needed plans quickly and reduce the impact of delays on your operational timeline.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

Atlas UP allows you to iterate and discuss various processes to derive operational timelines based on multiple scenarios. Instead of manually checking drives or asking department heads to recall how long it took to complete a particular task, you can use Atlas UP to access this information instantly.

With its integration into your company’s data, Atlas UP accurately reports the time taken for previous tasks to move from the “assigned” stage to the “completed” stage. This capability enables you to explore different scenarios, role-play various operational strategies, and determine the most efficient timelines for your operational plans.

By simulating multiple scenarios using your process data, Atlas UP helps you identify the best approach to meet your strategic goals. This iterative process ensures that your planning is both thorough and flexible, allowing you to adapt quickly to any changes or unexpected challenges.

To help speed up the process, you can also download a premade operational planning template and adjust it to your needs and requirements.

How Atlas UP Can Help You Create an Effective Operational Business Plan

With Atlas Up’s access to real-time in-house data, you don’t need to wait hours for an employee to score through files to get the answers you need to create an effective operational plan. You’ll also get accurate data that will help you make informed decisions during operational planning.

Our main objective is to eliminate the constant status updates and provide answers to simple questions, which usually interrupt the work of team members and create a bottleneck in productivity.

And also, we keep your company’s data safe by providing secure API integrations that only sync essential data to our application and deliberately omit sensitive details like SSNs.

Interested? Book a demo with us today, or you can reach out to discover what Atlas UP can do for your business.

Conclusion

A strategic plan is important, but without operational planning, a company might not achieve its long-term goals. To effectively carry out an operational plan, you must ensure that you use accurate in-house data and collaborate with management from different departments.

One of the best ways to ensure that the data you use during operational planning is accurate is by using an artificial intelligence business tool like Atlas UP. This will give you insights on how to create an easy-to-achieve operational plan and also point out potential risks, drawbacks and bottlenecks.

Book a demo with us today to understand how we can help you achieve your company’s short-term and long-term goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the five elements of operations planning?

The five elements that make operational planning effective include goals and objectives, KPIs for monitoring, budget and hiring requirements, key assumptions, risks and bottlenecks, and timeline. Without these five elements, an operational business plan might not be effective in achieving the company's long-term strategic plans.

What is an operational master plan?

An operational master plan is a comprehensive document that details the processes and tasks that will help a company achieve its long-term goals. It details the allocation of resources, timelines, and responsibilities for various operational activities, ensuring alignment with the overall strategic plan. This serves as a roadmap to guide day-to-day operations, improve efficiency, and support sustained growth and development.

How can the operational plan help a business achieve its strategic goals?

An operational plan helps a business achieve its strategic goals by breaking down long-term objectives into specific, actionable tasks and timelines. It ensures that the company's daily activities align with the broader vision. It allocates resources efficiently, assigns responsibilities, and sets performance metrics to help you track progress and make necessary adjustments.