Reviewing Your Plan

So how do you maintain your business plan? We have to first establish that without regular review -- monthly or at least quarterly review of your planned vs. actual results, with practical analysis of the reasons for variance -- planning is likely to be a waste of time.

Real planning requires regular reviews just as much as navigation requires knowing where you are as well as where you were and where you wanted to go.

Every real plan needs to be full of specific dates, budgets, forecasts, and management responsibilities. People involved have to know there will be tracking and following up on specifics. Then that plan must be reviewed against results, and those reviews should produce course corrections and fine tuning.

Generally a business hopes for a consistent long-term strategy built on short-step incremental changes, not major revisions. Consistency is important to strategy, and the business should avoid the temptation to jump around from one strategy to another so quickly that no strategy is ever really implemented. Remember that even a mediocre strategy well and consistently implemented is much better than a brilliant strategy that wasn't implemented.

However, businesses do come to crossroads demanding major revisions in their business plan. Read the nest article to get a measure of such circumstances