Business game plans

You need to understand the difference. A business plan is something that a company would give the bank to get a loan, or what a company may use to determine the financials.

A game plan is something that tells a leader or a professional the what, the how, the when and the why of achieving particular goals. A game plan is all about taking control of the business and ensuring that others will not affect the business negatively. Step 1. Write it Down. The first step in creating the game plan is simple, and yet it is what most people reading this will never get to doing-write it down. You have a thought. Nice, but useless. Thoughts have no business value until you write them down.

Working with production? Providing customer service after the product is delivered? Schedule those actions into your calendar. Everything you do, every action, has to occur in time.

Exactly when will you make the 20 sales calls? Get out your calendar and schedule four hours a day of sales calls. Be honest with yourself about how these actions are going to show up in your calendar.

What else do you need to schedule? Three hours for customer service? Four hours for production design? Two hours for administrative tasks? Now look at your calendar. Do you have enough time to deliver on your intention? Assess your resources. Looking at your calendar, you can quickly see where you may need additional resources. Maybe you need to hire an assistant five hours a week to handle customer service phoning and follow up.

Maybe you need an additional piece of equipment if you want to successfully produce every order. Do you need an extra salesperson? More phones? Another computer?

Monitor your progress. You can be sure that the Packers and Steelers will be keeping their eyes on the scoreboard all throughout the game. There are problems in society too, from climate change, to social inequality, to health pandemics. There is a lot of data to gather that will inform you of what this problem is, who is impacts, why its important, that will help set you up on your problem solving journey to define your game plan.

In the sporting examples that we have alluded to so far, the problems that clubs like the Manchester United Football Club, or the Ferrari Formula One Team have are multifaceted. These sporting businesses are big businesses too that make yearly revenue in the many 10s to s of millions. The big problems that they need to deal with in their businesses include:. Different types of businesses or organizations big and small will have their own sets of problems that they need to deal with in order to run and operate their enterprises, from getting traffic to their website, to making sales, to cutting costs, to training staff, to packaging and delivering goods to customers, to maintaining quality, health and safety or speed of delivery ….

And they need to be prioritized, in order to ensure resources, in the people, processes, data and systems that the business and teams have, are not wasted on the wrong things. Once you have all the data that gives a clear indication of the problem reality, where there is a big problem with lots of smaller ones too, then the second step is to prioritize these different smaller problems that manifest.

It is important to prioritize so that you can work out the order by which to address them in your solution, based on the resources that you have. You are taking the wrong actions based on making the wrong decisions, and wasting time and resources, including precious funds in your business.

And there are often tough decisions to make, and depending on your role in an enterprise, you may be that decision maker or you are the data scientist or analyst that is putting the scenarios together to help the boss make that decision, or possibly someone that contributes to the data or needs to be informed by the data.

There are actually four roles here, of people who are:. The objective of this step is to work out what happens in different scenarios, if different problems are not fixed and what could happen if it was, and even play around with the order or sequencing of these activities. This analysis is what give the enterprise and its decision maker different options, by which to act on. So in the example of the COVID pandemic, we see all these different data scientists along with input from their Chief Medical and Chief Scientific Offers working for their respective governments, analyse the data that they have from STEP 1, to determine how the virus could spread, depending on how they manage their lockdowns, from timing how different services are closed or restrictions lifted.

These scenarios backed by the data that they have of different quality and accuracy, are the options that they present to the decision makers, like a Secretary of Health, a Governor, a Prime Minister or President to make or take the right decisions.

The goal is to prioritize, including ruling things in and ruling things out, as well as sequencing activities to form multiple scenario options for consideration. In this step, the decision makers will evaluation the options presented by the analyst and scientists, and make the decision on what to proceed with.

Recalculations may be needed, as the decision-makers will ask questions related to the pros and cons of each option, what data was used, how good is the data, and what makes the recommended IDEAL scenario the best one.

The goal is to dive into the outcomes and both qualify them and quantify them — another step in the data science process.

T in order to enable the quantification and qualification process.