Last month I introduced the concept of Drive-thru Planning.™ It is a planning method designed specifically for the pace and scope of today's business environment. Technology enabled and competitor driven, business activity is being compressed into shorter and shorter time frames. It may have happened without fanfare or formal farewells, but traditional five-year business plans are no longer relevant, practical or feasible.

Don't get me wrong – planning is still a requisite for success, but you cannot let it become a bottleneck in your business. Business activity has to remain as far in front of planning as you can keep it, which may be several months or as much as a year. Beyond that is the land of goals and agility, not hard-set plans. But Drive-thru Planning (DtP™) is the express lane of effective planning in this new era. It operates under the presumption that aftermarket companies still must contemplate and prepare for their future but it needs to be done with a greater sense of urgency. Focused planning needs to be done more frequently, nimbly and compactly than the executive planning retreats of old.

Last month we covered phase one of DtP with the establishment of company goals and objectives. Defining a goal for the business and each department’s objectives to support the goal sets DtP in motion. These tasks can typically be accomplished by top managers in less than one half day.

The next step is to put in place strategies and tactics to support the goals and objectives. Last month we defined a goal as a mission and objectives as interim targets en route to the goal that are measurable in time and occurrences.

Strategies are specific policies or activities adopted to direct and guide meeting objectives. Typically, strategies must work on two levels: company-wide (overall strategies) and by department (support strategies for objectives).  If objectives are “what” we want to accomplish, strategies are “how” we propose to go about doing it. 

So if our objective is to “increase our market share by 30 percent in the next year” our strategy might be to “add new lines.” 

It's best to think of tactics as specific actions that fit inside a strategy and collectively lead to reaching objectives. So the actions we take to add new products might be to “introduce Web-enabled tools that inform our customers about them and make them easier to purchase.” These kinds of tactics clearly support the strategy of growing market share.

So, goals and objectives are the planning elements of an overall plan and strategies and tactics are the action elements that lead to their realization. From an implementation standpoint, goals and objectives probably should be hatched higher up in an organization while strategies and tactics are best developed at least in tandem with the managers that will implement them.

With goals and objectives and strategies and tactics in place, there is a critical element of planning that is too often overlooked. Effective DtP requires an essential third step: alignment of the plan with the resources available.    

First, everyone in the enterprise must be clear on the overall goal. Form there, every department or team needs to identify a small number (let’s say three) of key objectives that will help their team move toward the collective goal. Ideally, the strategies and tactics should cascade throughout the organization, building a pyramid of support. Each member of each department is made aware of specific actions they must perform in pursuit of the overall goal. It is this alignment of resources and the goal of an organization that makes DtP unique and effective.

Within the space of a few days every department has viable, supportive strategies to support objectives and every team member in every department is clear on group and departmental goals and departmental objectives, the entire enterprise is focused and aligned to be successful.

This process, repeated frequently on an ad hoc basis, makes good, solid planning possible for all companies. I've heard executives actually say, "We don't have time for planning." I've also heard it said that, "If you only have three minutes, take the first one to plan the other two."  DtP offers all organizations a reasonable way to strike a balance between the two and stay in control of their destiny.

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