purpose of operational business planning

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Operational Planning

Operational planning definition.

What does operational planning mean? Operational planning is a process that involves creating a detailed roadmap to align with a strategic plan.

The operational plan itself is a document that outlines timelines, action items, and critical milestones for executing the strategic plan. This document defines the organization’s objectives and goals and clarifies how to achieve them.

An operational planning process involves examining how a business operates and laying out who’s responsible for what and when.

Remember, every company approaches this differently, and annual operational plans are constantly updated or changed. The key to making it work? Clear and collaborative communication.

The timeframe to execute a plan typically depends on an organization’s velocity. For example, creating an annual operational plan is a fluid, changing process.

A well-conceived business operational plan keeps team members collaborating smoothly, ensures everyone knows what needs to be done and what their part is, and guides critical decisions about long-term strategy.

Critical steps of operational planning

Clearly define the goal or vision for the operational plan.

Analyze and identify essential business stakeholders, team members, budgets, and resources.

1. Clearly define the goal or vision for the operational plan.

2. Analyze and identify essential business stakeholders, team members, budgets, and resources.

3. Accurately plan for risk.

4. Consistently track performance.

5. Communicate to team members and stakeholders about progress.

6. Adapt the operational plan to broader company goals as needed.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning faqs.

What is operational planning for the business? Operational planning in business entails a team or department working to carry out a strategic plan. It’s a forward-looking process that outlines departmental goals, resources, and budget to ensure team-based activities align with the strategic plan.

Effective operational business plans rely on the commitment of the entire team or department. This buy-in ensures issues are promptly reported, goals are identified, timelines are adhered to, and business collaboration is optimized.

When there’s transparent communication between the finance department and the rest of the business, operational plans become even more efficient in driving the organization toward its objectives.

Examples of operational planning:

• A manufacturing company is developing a plan to boost revenue by 30%.
• Finance collaborating with sales, marketing, operations management, and other vital areas to align strategies supporting revenue growth and achieving business goals.
• A brand planning to launch a new product involves market research, R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, distribution, sales, marketing, and customer support.

Why is Operational Planning Important?

Just as a roadmap helps you navigate a physical journey, an operational plan guides your organization on its path to success.

Everyone on the team can refer to a single source of truth to understand the organization’s direction and how their roles contribute to achieving the overall goals. An operational plan is a living document that should be reviewed and updated regularly. It should be adaptable to changing circumstances and also provide stability and direction for your organization.

What are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

As we said, think of operational planning as the roadmap that keeps your business on the right track, regardless of size.

One of the most significant advantages of operational planning is getting everyone on the same page, working together like a well-oiled machine to reach your strategic company goals.

Operational planning helps leadership define responsibilities, daily tasks, and activities in detail. It also shows how team members support overall department and organizational goals and describes outcomes to measure against daily tasks.

It also boosts team productivity. Operational planning enhances efficiency, productivity, and profits by ensuring employees in each department and across the company know their daily responsibilities and objectives.

Here are some of the benefits of having a robust operational plan:

• Improved communication: An operational plan ensures everyone understands the organization’s goals and priorities.
• Increased efficiency: An operational plan streamlines your organization’s operations and improves its efficiency.
• Reduced risk: An operational plan allows organizations to identify and mitigate risks.
• Enhanced decision-making: An operational plan can help your organization make better decisions by providing a framework for evaluating different options.
• Improved accountability: An operational plan can hold your organization accountable for its performance.

Remember, operational plans are built by humans and are susceptible to human error. But when you weigh the pros against the cons, it’s clear that all organizations benefit from an operational plan in place to support growth.

Who is Responsible for Operational Planning?

Typically, an operational plan lives in the realm of middle management — in contrast to the C-suite’s strategic plan.

Operational plans have a narrower scope and focus on routine tasks that continuously evolve. Changes to the strategic plan are typically less frequent compared to operational plans.

There are several factors to consider when determining who creates operational plans: <H3>

• Scope. An operational plan is laser-focused on the initiative itself and the team, ensuring the scope is manageable. It should include the “who, what, and when” for every activity.
• Timeline . The duration of an operational plan can vary depending on the organization’s speed and velocity. It can cover a quarter, six months, or a fiscal year.
• Stakeholders. To accurately plan the work, involve operational planning stakeholders who are close to the work. Finance, in particular, plays a vital role in aligning tactical details with strategic execution.

Strategic Planning vs Operational Planning

Strategic, tactical, and operational planning are distinct yet interconnected processes organizations use to achieve their goals. Each level of planning has a specific focus and timeframe.

Let’s look at each type of plan in detail.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan describes an organization’s high-level goals, long-term vision, and mission, usually over the next three to five years.

This type of plan also details any significant projects or initiatives that must happen to meet this vision and how the organization will broadly measure the goals.

A strategic plan provides a big-picture view of the organization’s direction and broad objectives. In other words, it’s a visionary plan that doesn’t address the steps needed to achieve them.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan (also known as an operation plan, work plan, or operations plan) is a detailed outline of what a team or department will focus on in the immediate future, typically within the upcoming year.

The operational plan answers questions about weekly goals, tasks, and responsibilities, ensuring alignment with the organization’s strategic goals and mission.

What is a tactical plan?

A tactical plan maps out the steps an organization or team must take after creating their strategic and operational plans.

It involves breaking down strategic and operational plans into smaller, more manageable goals and objectives.

Tactical plans define the steps and actions needed to achieve the desired outcomes.

Critical differences between strategic planning, operational planning, and tactical planning

• Strategic plans focus on long-term goals and the overall direction of the organization.
• Operational plans focus on short-term, day-to-day activities and implementation.
• Tactical plans bridge the gap between strategic and operational planning, ensuring that the goals outlined in the strategic plan are achievable through specific actions.

The Best Plan for Your Team

Remember, strategic, tactical, and operational planning work together to ensure organizations have a clear and actionable roadmap for achieving their goals.

Strategic planning is essential for setting the long-term direction, while operational planning is crucial for executing day-to-day activities. Tactical planning can break down goals into smaller, achievable steps.

What is the Operational Planning Process?

Remember these best practices and operational planning techniques when building an operational planning cycle.

Research and Identify Goals

The goal of an operational plan is to address foundational questions.

Start by reviewing your strategic plan. Ask yourself, “How will our actions shape our organization?”

From there, consider the following factors:

1. Resources. What is your operating budget? How does it compare to previous years?

2. Staffing. Do you have enough talent to achieve your goals? How do you want to grow your workforce over one, two, and three years?

3. Tools. What operational planning methodology will you use to carry out your plan? What are the operational planning tools you will use?

4. Team alignment. Have you effectively communicated your organization’s vision for the future to your team members?

5. Performance benchmarks. How will you measure progress?

6. Prioritize feedback. Be willing to accept feedback and adjust the operational plan as necessary.

Visualize the Operational Plan

To bring your operational plan to life, you must clearly articulate it to your team.

Project management software can offer all stakeholders a high-level view of tasks and progress. Identify which operational business planning techniques and tools will best achieve the organization’s goals.

Operational planning software can be a valuable asset throughout the process.

Assign People and Budget

In operational planning, budgeting involves assigning tasks and allocating resources to team members to achieve specific financial goals.

Each budget item should align with the strategic objectives outlined in the operational plan, with corresponding timelines and deliverables.

Tracking and Informing Progress

To ensure effective monitoring and progress reporting, establish a reporting system that aligns with the goals, targets, deliverables, resource allocation, and timetables outlined in the operational plan.

This reporting process allows stakeholders to provide regular feedback on the plan’s implementation and track advancements toward achieving the desired outcomes.

Adjust the Operational Plan as Needed

The most effective operational plans can identify areas for improvement. The team can then strategically adjust the plan, involve additional members, and proceed toward the next benchmark with a refined approach.

What Should Operational Planning Include?

No two operational plans are alike. What is consistent across plans is that the primary goal is to create a functional operational plan that aligns with the organization’s mission and strategic plan.

A clearly defined operational plan ensures that every manager and employee understands their specific responsibilities and the methods and timing of their execution.

Here are key elements of an operational plan:

• A title page. This summarizes the operational plan.
• An executive summary. This provides a few sentences with a rough idea of the overall plan and its primary sections.
• Mission statement. A clear and concise statement of your organization’s purpose and values.
• Vision statement. A description of what your organization will achieve. This will come from your strategic plan.
• Goals and KPIs. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives your organization wants to achieve.
• Timeline. A schedule of when your organization plans to achieve its goals and objectives.
• Financial summary. A detailed plan of how your organization will allocate its financial resources.
• Hiring plan. Determine how many monthly/quarterly team members to hire across different departments.
• Strategies. The methods your organization will use to achieve its goals.
• Tactics. The specific actions your organization will take to implement its strategies.
• Key assumptions and risks. Provide a risk analysis to mitigate issues before they arise.
• Metrics. The measures your organization will use to track its progress and evaluate its success.
• Next steps. Suggest next steps, if any.

What are the Steps to Build an Operational Plan?

Operational planning aims to create a practical plan that supports existing strategic goals, not to generate new ones.

Like project planning, operational planning is never a one-and-done task but a continuous process.

Here are the steps you need to get started:

1. Start with a strategic plan

Before diving into operational details, establish the long-term vision and goals through a strategic plan.

The leadership team should create and monitor the strategic plan, making necessary adjustments.

2. Sharpen the scope

Narrow down the operational plan’s scope to a specific department, team, or focus area.

Start big with the strategic plan, then narrow down to the operational plan. From there, focus on the tactical areas you need to see your plan through — in other words, a supporting action plan.

3. Identify key stakeholders

Before executing the operational plan, it’s crucial to recognize the key stakeholders involved in the operational planning process.

These team members play a vital role in leading and informing others. Identifying these team members in advance ensures effective communication and successful execution of the operational plan.

4. Create the operational plan

Your operational plan outlines the timeframe for achieving specific goals and presents the team’s actions. It must include objectives, deliverables, quality standards (if any), desired outcomes, operating budget, staffing and resource requirements, and progress and monitoring information.

5. Share the operational plan

Share the operational plan with key stakeholders so they understand mission-critical goals and the daily tasks that support them.

Track progress in real-time for best results. This also allows you to update the operational plan and report on progress to team members and stakeholders as needed.

Does Planful Help With Operational Planning?

Absolutely! Planful’s Financial Performance Management platform seamlessly integrates the demand for structured planning in finance with the business’s need for dynamic planning.

With Planful, you can create collaborative financial plans that align resources with strategic goals. Planful also automates the data collection process for operational planning, saving you from a time-consuming, manual process.

The platform’s agility enables you to adapt and pivot quickly in response to changing business conditions. You can reliably model numerous scenarios and effortlessly convert annual plans into quarterly or monthly rolling forecasts, all tailored to the organization’s current requirements.

Learn more about Planful’s Operational Planning solution .

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What an operating plan is and why you absolutely need one.

Most companies spend valuable time and resources to create strategic plans, giving their best to outline a strategy that establishes a solid long-term vision. While having a strategic plan is necessary, a vast number of organizations often lack a critical strategy element: an operating plan.

An operational business plan outlines the details of your daily operations for over one year. It defines who does what, when they do it, and how they do it. When done well, an operation plan defines how you allocate human, physical, and financial resources to reach short-term objectives that support your larger business goals.

What Is An Operational Plan And Why Is It Important?

An operation plan is an extremely detail-oriented plan that clearly defines how a team or department contributes to reaching company goals. It outlines the daily tasks required for running a business. When properly created, an operating plan makes sure each manager and each employee know their specific obligations, as well as how they should execute them within a defined timeline. Mapping out the day-to-day tasks that ensure a clear path to your business and operational goals is essential to success.

On a daily basis, your operations plan should answer these crucial questions:

• What are the strategies and tasks that need to be completed or achieved?
• Who are the individuals responsible for those tasks and strategies?
• When must each strategy be completed?
• How much will it cost?

Your strategic plan is a manual that ensures your company and all its employees execute day-to-day operations in a way that ensures reaching your long-term business goals.

Operational Planning VS Strategic Planning

Very often, a strategic business plan also functions as an operating plan. The confusing of the two can cause problems because both plans are necessary for any company to achieve its goals.

A strategic plan helps your business outline long-term goals and fulfill the big vision. Operating plans define what processes need to be finished to achieve those goals. An operating plan supports the efforts of a strategic plan and makes sure everyone runs their day-to-day tasks as efficiently as possible. Both are action plans, and since the success of the strategic plan heavily depends on the efficiency of the operating plan, you should create it right after outlining your long-term strategy.

A successful company never chooses between an operational plan and a strategic plan. Instead, market leaders make sure they have both. Simply put, a strategic plan outlines your long-term goals for the future, while an operating plan defines how to get there through daily activities and processes.

The goal of an operating plan is to define how all departments join efforts to achieve your vision.

The Steps Of A Successful Operational Business Plan

You can't create a successful operational plan without clearly defining your operational goals. The template below walks you through several important steps to take if you want to develop a functional operating plan:

• Create your strategic plan first. An operating plan is a necessary tool for achieving the goals you've defined in a strategy, so first, you should make sure your strategic plan is in place.
• Focus on essential goals. All successful operating plan examples stick to one rule—focus on goals that matter the most. A complex plan with multiple unclear goals is hard to follow.
• Instead of lagging, use leading indicators. Lagging indicators will show your efforts are falling short only after you already execute the operations. By contrast, leading indicators include predictive measures that will prevent you from making a mistake in the first place.
• Choose the right KPIs. Defining the appropriate KPIs for your business is essential. You shouldn't develop them all by yourself. Instead, involve the whole team in the process.
• Communication is key. Everyone in the company should learn and understand what metrics you use, why they are important, and what everyone's roles are in working toward your goals.

Note, you can always check out our blog for more successful business tips like this!

Want additional insight? Read 4 Step Guide to Strategic Planning now to learn more

Operational Planning Examples

An operational plan template should help you define and improve the day-to-day actions and processes of your business. Any successful operational plan example indicates that the plans include everything your company does daily to deliver your products or services to customers. They may cover any section, department, and operation. You can find numerous examples of successful operational plan implementation, especially among powerful enterprises.

Let's go over the most common ways of utilizing a proper operational plan:

Planning for Processes and Practices

Businesses often create operational plans for specific processes and practices to ensure they’re meeting objectives in what they deem the important areas. These include efficiency, turnaround time, productivity, cost reduction, waste reduction, sustainability, quality, and customer satisfaction. You can find a successful operating plan example in any department.

Planning As a Strategy Component

Take a look at this operational planning example: let's say a company makes strategic efforts to expand volume production by 50% by the end of the year. The strategic plan will include several critical components: marketing, sales, and operations. The operations part of the plan will include manufacturing, financial, and logistic strategies to achieve a boost in production.

Bottom Line

An operational plan is the key element of every goal-oriented organization. Contact The Alternative Board today to schedule a meeting with our team of business advisory services specialists. We will help you produce an effective operations plan that will help you fulfill your long-term business goals.

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Operational Planning: How to Make an Operations Plan

The operations of your business can be defined as the sum of all the daily activities that you and your team execute to create products or services and engage with your customers, among other critical business functions. While organizing these moving parts might sound difficult, it can be easily done by writing a business operational plan. But before we learn how to make one, let’s first understand what’s the relationship between strategic and operational planning.

Operational Planning vs. Strategic Planning

Operational planning and strategic planning are complementary to each other. This is because strategic plans define the business strategy and the long-term goals for your organization, while operational plans define the steps required to achieve them.

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Operational Plan Template

Use this free Operational Plan Template for Word to manage your projects better.

What Is a Strategic Plan?

A strategic plan is a business document that describes the business goals of a company as well as the high-level actions that will be taken to achieve them over a time period of 1-3 years.

What Is an Operational Plan?

Operational plans map the daily, weekly or monthly business operations that’ll be executed by the department to complete the goals you’ve previously defined in your strategic plan. Operational plans go deeper into explaining your business operations as they explain roles and responsibilities, timelines and the scope of work.

Operational plans work best when an entire department buys in, assigning due dates for tasks, measuring goals for success, reporting on issues and collaborating effectively. They work even better when there’s a platform like ProjectManager , which facilitates communication across departments to ensure that the machine is running smoothly as each team reaches its benchmark. Get started with ProjectManager for free today.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of turning strategic plans into action plans, which simply means breaking down high-level strategic goals and activities into smaller, actionable steps. The main goal of operational planning is to coordinate different departments and layers of management to ensure the whole organization works towards the same objective, which is achieving the goals set forth in the strategic plan .

How to Make an Operational Plan

There’s no single approach to follow when making an operation plan for your business. However, there’s one golden rule in operations management : your strategic and operational plans must be aligned. Based on that principle, here are seven steps to make an operational plan.

• Map business processes and workflows: What steps need to be taken at the operations level to accomplish long-term strategic goals?
• Set operational-level goals: Describe what operational-level goals contribute to the achievement of larger strategic goals.
• Determine the operational timeline: Is there any time frame for the achievement of the operational plan?
• Define your resource requirements: Estimate what resources are needed for the execution of the operational plan.
• Estimate the operational budget: Based on your resource requirements, estimate costs and define an operational budget.
• Set a hiring plan: Are there any skills gaps that need to be filled in your organization?
• Set key performance indicators: Define metrics and performance tracking procedures to measure your team’s performance.

Free Operational Plan Template

Leverage everything you’ve learned today with our template. This free operational plan template for Word will help you define your budget, timeline, KPIs and more. It’s the perfect first step in organizing and improving your operations. Download it today.

What Should be Included in an Operational Plan?

Your operational plan should describe your business operations as accurately as possible so that internal teams know how the company works and how they can help achieve the larger strategic objectives. Here’s a list of some of the key elements that you’ll need to consider when writing an operational plan.

Executive Summary

An executive summary is a brief document that summarizes the content of larger documents like business plans, strategic plans or operation plans. Their main purpose is to provide a quick overview for busy stakeholders.

Operational Budget

An operational budget is an estimation of the expected operating costs and revenues for a given time period. As with other types of budget, the operational budget defines the amount of money that’s available to acquire raw materials, equipment or anything else that’s needed for business operations.

It’s important to limit your spending to stay below your operational budget, otherwise, your company could run out of resources to execute its normal activities. You can use our free operating budget template for Excel to track your operating costs.

Operational Objectives

It’s essential to align your operational objectives with your strategic objectives. For example, if one of your strategic objectives is to increase sales by 25 percent over the next three years, one possible operational objective would be to hire new sales employees. You should always grab your strategic plan objectives and turn them into one or multiple action items .

Processes & Workflows

Explain the various business processes, workflows and tasks that need to be executed to achieve your operational objectives. Make sure to explain what resources are needed, such as raw materials, equipment or human resources.

Operational Timeline

It’s important to establish a timeline for your operational plan. In most cases, your operational plan will have the same length as your strategic plan, but in some scenarios, you might create multiple operational plans for specific purposes. Not all operational plans are equal, so the length of your operational timeline will depend on the duration of your projects , workflows and processes.

Hiring Plan

Find any skills gap there might be in your team. You might need to hire a couple of individuals or even create new departments in order to execute your business processes .

Quality Assurance and Control

Most companies implement quality assurance and control procedures for a variety of reasons such as customer safety and regulatory compliance. In addition, quality assurance issues can cost your business millions, so establishing quality management protocols is a key step in operational planning.

Key Performance Indicators

It’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the productivity of your business operations. You can define as many KPIs as needed for all your business processes. For example, you can define KPIs for marketing, sales, product development and other key departments in your company. This can include product launch deadlines, number of manufactured goods, number of customer service cases closed, number of 5-star reviews received, number of customers acquired, revenue increased by a certain percentage and so on.

Risks, Assumptions and Constraints

Note any potential risks, assumptions and time or resource constraints that might affect your business operations.

What Are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

Every plan has a massive effect on all team members involved, and those can be to your company’s benefit or to their detriment. If it’s to their detriment, it’s best to find out as soon as possible so you can modify your operational plan and pivot with ease.

But that’s the whole point of operational planning: you get to see the effect of your operations on the business’s bottom line in real time, or at every benchmark, so you know exactly when to pivot. And with a plan that’s as custom to each department as an operational plan, you know exactly where things go wrong and why.

How ProjectManager Can Help with Operational Planning

Creating and implementing a high-quality operational plan is the best way to ensure that your organization starts out a project on the right foot. ProjectManager has award-winning project management tools to help you craft and execute such a plan.

Gantt charts are essential to create and monitor operational plans effectively. ProjectManager helps you access your Gantt chart online so you can add benchmarks for operational performance reviews. You can also create tasks along with dependencies to make the operation a surefire success.

Whether you’re a team of IT system administrators, marketing experts, or engineers, ProjectManager includes robust planning and reporting tools. Plan in sprints, assign due dates, collaborate with team members and track everything with just the click of a button. Plus, we have numerous ready-made project reports that can be generated instantly, including status reports, variance reports, timesheet reports and more.

Related Operations Management Content

• Operational Strategy: A Quick Guide
• Operations Management: Key Functions, Roles and Skills
• Operational Efficiency: A Quick Guide
• Using Operational Excellence to Be More Productive

Operational planning isn’t done in a silo, and it doesn’t work without the full weight of the team backing it up. Ensure that your department is successful at each benchmark. ProjectManager is an award-winning pm software dedicated to helping businesses smooth out their operational plans for a better year ahead. Sign up for our free 30-day trial today.

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• Learn how to do operational planning th ...

Learn how to do operational planning the right way

Some of this planning will be developed yearly—things like your yearly objectives and key results, for example, will naturally grow as time goes on. But to make sure you’re staying on track and executing against your long-term goals, you need an operational plan. 

What is operational planning?

Operational planning is the process of turning your strategic plan into a detailed map that outlines exactly what action your team will take on a weekly, or sometimes even daily, basis. An operational plan will include action items and milestones that each team or department needs to complete in order to execute your strategic plan. 

During the operational planning process, outline each team or person’s responsibilities for the next quarter, six months, or fiscal year. The level of detail and timeline you select for your operational plan should depend on how quickly your organization typically moves—if you’re a fast-paced team with an accelerated roadmap, consider creating an operational plan for the next quarter or half year. But if your organization tends to think more long-term, create an operational plan for the entire fiscal year.

Operational planning vs. strategic planning

A strategic plan is a business-level plan of your long-term strategy for the next three to five years. An operational plan is smaller in both scope and timeline. The goal of operational planning is to outline the daily actions you need to take to hit your strategic goals. 

Unlike a strategic plan, an operational plan should also focus on implementation . What daily and weekly actions does your team need to take in order to accomplish your longer-term strategic plan? What specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you need to track on a regular basis in order to ensure that your team is progressing towards your objectives? These details should be captured in your operational plan.

Who should create an operational plan?

To capture exactly who is doing what by when, an operational plan needs to be very detailed. For this reason, create an operational plan at a smaller scale than your strategic plan—both in terms of timeline and scope. Instead of trying to create an operational plan for your entire company, create one at the department or team level. At a larger company, you could even create an operational plan for a specific initiative—similar to a detailed work plan .

For example, create an operational plan to explain the daily tasks your IT department needs to do in order to support the company. Your IT department’s operational plan might include how frequently IT team members will check the IT requests project inbox , budgeting details for the program, how the IT team will onboard and equip new employees, and how frequently the team will meet. 

There are three levels to who should create an operational plan:

Scope: Your operational plan will capture the who, what, and when of each activity. It should be laser-focused on a team or initiative.

Timeline: Depending on how fast your organization moves, your operational plan should span a quarter, six months, or a fiscal year. 

Stakeholders: Make sure the people involved in operational planning are close to the work, so they can accurately project and predict what work should be included in the plan.

The benefits of operational planning

A strategic plan is a great way to proactively align your team around a shared purpose. By defining long-term goals, you can outline exactly where you want to go.

An operational plan helps you hit your strategic goals. According to our research, only 26% of knowledge workers have a very clear understanding of how their individual work relates to company goals. By creating a detail-oriented operational plan, you can define exactly what short-term goals you need to achieve in order to be on track towards your long-term objectives. It can help you think through the actions you’re currently taking or need to take in order to execute against your goals. 

In particular, an operational plan:

Clarifies exactly what your team will be doing on a weekly and daily basis.

Provides a comprehensive guide of the day-to-day operations your team members need to take in order to accomplish your long-term goals.

Sets a benchmark for daily expectations, so you can avoid getting off track.

5 steps to making an operational plan

During the operational planning process, you're not creating new plans or developing new goals. Rather, to create an operational plan, assess everything your team is currently working on and everything you need to do on a daily or weekly basis to hit your strategic goals. Here’s how:

1. Start with a strategic plan

If you haven’t already, create a strategic plan first. You need a long-term vision and goals before you can break down the day-to-day details. There are four steps to creating a strategic plan:

Determine your position

Develop your strategy

Build your strategic plan

Share, monitor, and manage your strategic plan

To learn more, read our article on strategic planning .

2. Narrow down your scope

In order to create a detail-oriented operational plan, you need to narrow the scope to a team, department, or focus area. The scope of your operational plan will depend on the size of your company.

For example, imagine you’re breaking down your strategic plan into action plans for various company departments. Your marketing team spans multiple functions—for example, design , product marketing, social media, content creation, and web promotion. To capture specific, daily functions within each team, you should create an operational action plan for each smaller team. 

3. Identify key stakeholders

Before creating an operational plan, decide who will be involved in the operational planning process. The team members creating the operational plan should be relatively close to the actions the plan describes. 

To continue our example, the design team’s operational plan should be created by the head of the design team and the team leads (depending on the size of the team). Once they’ve created their operational plan, the team should share the plan with the head of marketing for final approval.

4. Create the plan

Your operational plan explains the actions your team will take to achieve your goals within a set time frame. To create an operational plan, outline:

Your team’s objectives

The deliverables that will be achieved by the operational plan

Any desired outcomes or quality standards

Staffing and resource requirements , including your operating budget

How you will monitor and report on progress

If you’re struggling to figure out all the details that should be included in your operational plan, ask yourself the following questions: 

What do we need to accomplish? This information should come from your strategic plan or yearly goals.

What daily tasks do we need to complete in order to hit our goals? These can be daily tasks you’re currently doing or new work that needs to be kicked off.

Who are the people responsible for those tasks? Make sure each task has one owner so there’s no confusion about who to go to for questions or updates.

What are our metrics for success? If you haven’t already, make sure your goals follow the SMART framework . 

To continue our example, here’s the framework the design team might use to create their operational plan:

Part of the strategic plan for the marketing team is to increase share of voice in the market—which means more eyes on marketing materials and increased engagement with potential customers. To support these goals, the design team will: 

Create additional promotional materials for the social team

Revamp the website home page to attract more potential customers

To accomplish these two goals in the next year, the design team will:

Hire two new team members to focus on social media engagement

Partner with the web development team within the marketing department to create an interactive home page

To track and report on their progress, the design team will use Asana as their central source of truth for key performance metrics, including:

What designs they are creating

The level of engagement they’re getting on social media

The progress of the website update

This is just the framework the design team would use to create their operational plan. Bring this plan to life within a work management tool like Asana to share clarity on all of the work the team needs to do to hit their goals. With work management, every task can be tracked in real-time from inception to completion.

5. Share and update your operational plan

Once you’ve created the plan, share it with key stakeholders so they understand your team’s most important goals and the daily tasks it will take to get there. Manage your plan and updates in a shared tool that captures real-time progress, like Asana .

Like any element of project planning, things will inevitably change. Actively monitor your operational plan and report on progress so key stakeholders and team members can stay updated on how you’re tracking against your goals. Report on progress monthly through written status updates . 

Get started with operational planning

An operational plan can help you ensure you’re making progress on long-term goals. But in order for this plan to be effective, make sure you’re tracking your work in a centrally-accessible tool. Siloed information and goals don’t help anyone—instead, track your action items and goals in a work management tool.

Related resources

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What is management by objectives (MBO)?

Operational Planning: a Practical Guide for Businesses

Learn about operational planning, its best practices and how to execute it flawlessly in your business.

Every business owner dreams of success. But without a clear roadmap, even the hardest workers can get lost in the shuffle of daily tasks, losing sight of their grand ambitions.

Operational planning is that roadmap, breaking down lofty goals into actionable steps. It’s not just about working hard — it’s about working smart.

Dive into this guide as we dissect operational planning and show how it can propel your business toward its next significant milestone.

What is operational planning?

Operational planning is about making detailed plans for achieving short-term goals, usually within a year. It turns big strategies into specific tasks and steps that teams can follow.

For example, a store might have an operational plan for the holiday season that includes sales targets and staffing schedules.

This kind of planning helps everyone know what they need to do and ensures that resources are used effectively.

It’s like creating a detailed map for a journey, making sure the ship stays on course and reaches its destination smoothly.

Operational planning is essential because it directly helps an organization reach its bigger goals, even though it might seem like a small part of the process.

What’s the difference between an operational plan and a strategic plan?

An operational plan is a short-term, detailed guide for day-to-day work, aiming to reach goals within a year. It's like a specific recipe you follow to cook a meal.

On the other hand, a strategic plan sets long-term company goals for the next three to five years, giving the big picture of what you want to achieve, similar to planning a menu for a week.

The operational plan shows the steps ( how and when ), while the strategic plan shows the overall goals ( what and why ).

Understanding the difference between operational and strategic planning helps you (and your team) use time and resources wisely , keeps everyone on the same page, and ensures that every small task inches you closer to your bigger goals.

Why operational planning is so important for your business

Enhances team productivity.

Operational planning helps everyone know what to do, stay excited about their work, and focus on important tasks, making the whole team work better.

Operational planning helps achieve this by:

• Establishing clear roles: Everyone knows exactly what their job is, what their key performance indicators are, and what results they’re expected to deliver
• Motivating through clarity: Having clear goals helps everyone feel more ready and eager to work.
• Identifying levers: Everyone works on what’s most important — the “levers” that make big impacts — rather than “ putting their time in” on bootless tasks.

This way, operational planning guides every team member in contributing effectively, enhancing overall productivity .

Provides clarity and direction

A good operational plan shows the best way to use time and money and lays a clear path for the team.

It does this through:

• Smart use of resources: A solid operational plan makes sure that time and money are spent on the most important things.
• Knowing what’s important: Prioritization helps teams focus on the big tasks first.
• Removing the guesswork: Make sure everyone knows the plan and follows it.

These elements work together to guide the team towards achieving their goals efficiently.

‎Secures alignment with strategic objectives and goals

Operational planning connects everyday tasks to the company’s big organizational goals, helps check progress, and keeps everyone working together towards the same aim.

It accomplishes this by:

• Connecting daily activities to big ideas: 41% of US workers aren’t sure what their organizational purpose is. So, establishing this connection shows how every task helps achieve the main goals.
• Regular check-ins: These let the team check if they’re on the right path and make changes if needed.
• One shared goal: A unified front keeps everyone working towards the company’s primary aim.

This alignment keeps everyone moving in the same direction, ensuring all the work contributes to the business’s success.

Boosts business flexibility

A strong operational plan prepares your business for sudden changes, helps plan for possible challenges, and lets leaders make quick decisions.

Operational planning shapes this adaptability through the following:

• Preparing for surprises: “Expecting the unexpected” helps the business adjust quickly when these unexpected things happen.
• Nurturing a problem-solving mindset: By thinking about what problems threaten the business, teams nurture problem-solving skills , leading to better decision-making.
• Quick decisions: Operational planning helps leaders make fast and informed choices. Being flexible like this is key to staying strong and ready for anything in business.

Each of these elements helps your business survive in the face of uncertainty and become more resilient to unexpected threats.

Streamlines decision-making

Operational planning makes decision-making easier by using facts, clear steps, and setting priorities to guide choices.

Operational planning supports this by:

• Helping you make choices based on facts: Operational planning ensures that decisions are based on real information, not just feelings.
• Establishing clear procedures: A clear plan defines steps for various processes so that you’re not shooting from the hip, hoping you’ll do things right.
• Fewer arguments: With clear priorities, there's less disagreement on what to do next, saving time, money, and the sanity of everyone on the team.

The bottom line is that by streamlining decision-making in this way, operational planning helps the business navigate challenges and seize opportunities effectively.

Challenges of operational planning

Operational planning is essential for a business’s success, but it’s not without challenges. Let’s break these down to understand them better.

Balancing today's work with tomorrow's goals

It’s tough to manage daily tasks while also thinking about the future. Imagine a juggler trying to keep several balls in the air at once. If they focus too much on one ball, the others might drop.

In business, concentrating only on today's work can cause us to lose sight of our long-term goals.

And deciding whether to spend our time and money now or save it for later can be tricky. It’s like being at a crossroads and needing to choose the right path that leads to growth and success.

Gathering reliable information

Today, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before. But this can be overwhelming. It’s like trying to drink water from a fire hose – too much too fast.

It's challenging to know what information is important and what isn't. For example, a business might have a lot of customer feedback, but figuring out which comments will help improve the product can be hard.

And because the business world moves so quickly, using old information can lead to mistakes. It’s like trying to hit a moving target using an outdated map.

Keeping your team aligned

Making sure everyone on a team understands and follows the plan can be like herding cats. Even with clear instructions, people might need clarification. And some might not want to change the way they work, even if it’s for the better.

It’s essential to keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction. Think of it as a boat crew rowing together; if everyone is in sync, the boat moves smoothly. But if not, it can be a bumpy ride.

The bottom line is that operational planning is key to a business’s growth, but it has its hurdles.

Balancing daily work with future plans, finding the correct information, and aligning the team are all “mission critical.”

Tackling these challenges head-on can lead to a smoother journey and a brighter future for the business.

How to create an operational plan

Creating your operational plan requires a systematic approach so that you cover all the bases to set your business on a path to achieve its goals.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through the process.

Step 1: Review your big picture

Start by taking a step back and looking at the overarching goals of your business. What are the main objectives you want to achieve in the next year or even five years? These could range from increasing revenue and expanding market share to improving customer satisfaction.

Step 2: Identify current strengths and weaknesses

Once you have a clear understanding of your long-term goals, it’s time to assess your current situation. Conducting a SWOT analysis can be a helpful tool here. This involves identifying your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s about understanding what you’re doing well, where you could improve, and what external factors might impact your business.

Step 3: Set clear, actionable objectives

With your SWOT analysis in hand, you can now set specific short-term targets that will help you achieve your long-term goals. Make sure these targets are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of setting a vague goal like "increase sales," a SMART goa l would be "increase sales by 10% in the next quarter."

‎Step 4: Determine resources needed

Next, list out all the resources you will need to achieve your objectives. This could include money, staff, equipment, and more. Also, plan how you will secure these resources. It might involve hiring new staff, purchasing equipment, or reallocating existing resources.

Step 5: Assign roles and tasks

Clearly define who in your team is responsible for what. Make sure every member knows their specific duties and the deadlines associated with them. This helps in ensuring accountability and that everyone is on the same page.

Step 6: Monitor progress regularly

Set up regular check-ins, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly, to track the progress of your operational plan. Use these sessions to identify issues, address problems, and make necessary adjustments to stay on track.

Step 7: Be ready to adjust the plan

Finally, understand that no plan is perfect from the get-go. Be flexible and open to making changes based on the feedback you receive and the results you observe. The business environment is always changing, and your operational plan should be adaptable enough to change with it.

By following these steps, you create a solid foundation for your business to achieve its strategic initiatives , ensuring you are prepared for the journey ahead.

Examples of operational plans

Next, we'll go through practical examples to show you how operational plans work in real-life situations.

You'll see the steps involved and understand how these plans help businesses achieve their goals.

By looking at these examples, you'll get a clearer idea of how to apply operational planning to different scenarios.

Example 1: A gym aiming to boost membership rates

Suppose we have a local gym aiming to boost membership by introducing new fitness classes.

• Goal: Increase gym memberships by 15% by launching three new fitness classes within the next six months.
• Strength: Loyal member base and knowledge of their fitness preferences.
• Weakness: Limited space in the gym and lack of instructors for specialized classes.
• Objective: Research popular fitness trends, hire or train instructors, and set up class schedules in 5 months. Dedicate one month for promotion to attract new members.

Step 4: Determine resources needed

• Need: Equipment for the new classes, trained instructors, and promotional materials to entice new sign-ups.
• Manager to research and decide on the new classes.
• HR to recruit or train instructors.
• Marketing team (or person) to create a campaign that highlights the new classes and appeals to potential members.
• Bi-weekly meetings to check on class setup progress and track membership sign-up rates.
• If the classes aren't drawing in the expected number of new members, consider offering promotions, adjusting class times, or exploring different class types.

Example 2: A local bookstore aiming to increase sales

Suppose there’s a local bookstore that wants to increase book sales by hosting monthly themed events.

• Goal: Boost monthly sales by 20% by hosting themed events over the next six months.
• Strength: Well-curated book selection and a cozy venue that's popular for gatherings.
• Weakness : Limited marketing experience and budget constraints for organizing larger events.
• Objective: Identify and organize one themed event per month that resonates with the community, driving both event attendance and book sales.
• Need: Event materials, possible guest speakers or performers, promotional flyers, and online ads.
• Store owner to select monthly themes and potential books to highlight.
• Staff members to handle event logistics like setting up, decorating, and coordinating with guest speakers.
• A dedicated person (or outsourced help) to manage promotion, both in-store and online.
• Post-event reviews to measure attendance, book sales during the event, and gather attendee feedback for future improvements.
• If an event theme doesn't mesh with customers or fails to boost sales as expected, brainstorm new themes, adjust marketing strategies, or consider partnerships with local businesses for joint events.

How Motion helps your operational planning

Efficient operational planning is key in the fast-paced business world, and Motion is here to streamline that process.

AI-powered scheduling adapts to changes, keeping your business on track

Motion’s AI-powered scheduling plans your day, ensuring nothing is missed by rescheduling uncompleted tasks. This feature helps you focus on priority tasks adapting to real-time changes.

Project oversight keeps the team together and in the know

Motion provides a clear overview of all team tasks, reducing the need for constant check-ins and enhancing communication. Tasks are sorted by priority, deadlines, and dependencies, aligning the team towards common goals.

Unified work management keeps tasks organized in one spot, making work smoother.

Motion consolidates to-dos, calendars, and tasks in one place, streamlining your workflow. It ranks tasks by importance and alerts you to deadlines, helping you manage your time effectively.

By integrating Motion into your operational planning, your business gains a tool that promotes efficiency, clarity, and focus, transforming operational planning into a strategic advantage.

Master operational planning with Motion

Planning is key, but with Motion, it's a breeze.

Want smoother workflows and better results?

Give Motion a try.

See how it can refine your operational planning and execution, making tasks simpler and your business stronger.

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Operational Plan: Everything You Need To Know (2024 Guide)

The old way of planning no longer works in complex and unpredictable business environments, and companies are struggling to find their feet on shaky ground. As we’ve seen with many of our customers and strategies in Cascade, organizations can no longer count on executing three or even five-year strategic plans.

The new reality forces companies and their operations teams to adapt their operational plans more frequently and within shorter time frames if they want to reap benefits faster than their competitors. Organizations need to work on their strategic instinct and fast adaptability to enhance their operational efficiency .  

And that requires big changes—including building a flexible operational plan, supported by the right tools and systems that help you achieve real-time centralized observability and empower a strategic response to external disruptions.

Read this article to build a bulletproof operational plan that includes all the key elements necessary to overcome unpredictable business chaos. You’ll also get free templates that will help you rapidly adapt and align your teams.

✨Bonus: We’ve included pro tips from business leaders in our network to help you identify gaps in your strategy execution and build resilient business operations.

What Is An Operational Plan?

An operational plan is action and detail-oriented; it needs to focus on short-term strategy execution and outline an organization's day-to-day operations. If your operations strategy is a promise, your operational plan is the action plan for how you will deliver on it every day, week, and month.

Put simply, an operational plan helps you bridge the gap between business strategy and on-the-ground execution and ensures that the organization is on track to achieve its long-term goals.

Benefits of operational planning

• Clear definition of relationships between cross-functional teams in different departments and responsibilities for each to eliminate duplicated efforts.
• Tighter alignment between corporate or business unit strategic plans and on-the-ground execution, helping the organization meet its business targets.
• Strong operating system that enables the company to quickly adapt, deliver operations goals, and monitor performance.

Operational planning vs. strategic planning

Operational planning deals with the day-to-day details and short-term goals, while strategic planning focuses on the big picture and long-term direction of an organization.

To put it in simpler terms, operational planning is about the "how" of daily tasks, while strategic planning defines the "what" and "why" for future success.

📚Recommended reading: Strategic vs. Operational Planning

Kickstart Your Operational Planning Process: Lay The Foundation

The quality of your operational plan will depend on your input. A successful operational planning initiative will consider these aspects:

• Who will be involved? Identify and include employees, customers, and the management team in the planning process to gain valuable insights from the front lines, ensuring better strategy and execution buy-in.
• What are your internal capabilities? Assess internal capabilities by conducting an internal analysis , including resource requirements, operating budget, and talent skills. Talent management and employee engagement are just a few of the many challenges that COOs will have on their operations agenda.
• What environment are you operating in? Conduct an external analysis (e.g., PESTLE or Porter’s 5 Forces ) to inform your approach and identify optimization opportunities and risks, keeping you agile in a changing market.
• Is it aligned with your organization’s strategy? Ensure alignment of your operational plan with your organization’s strategic plan to actively support the company's long-term vision and contribute to key business metrics.

👉🏻 Once you’ve gathered this information, you can develop an operational plan to help you execute business strategies.

Key Elements Of Your Operational Plan

Enough chit-chat; it’s time to put your operational plan together. We've built this based on our proven and tested approach, used by over +45,000 Cascade users.

See how Cascade Strategy Execution Platform enhances operational efficiency by reducing duplication and aligning teams toward common goals. It effectively eliminates waste resulting from misalignment, fostering smoother operations and improved performance.

Here’s a recap of the five key elements your plan must consider:

Choose key metrics aligned with the company goals

Selecting your operational plan's key metrics isn't a mere exercise in tracking numbers; it's about laser-focused alignment with your business needs and objectives. These metrics are the tangible indicators of your organization's efficiency and performance. They serve as the compass, guiding your daily decisions and actions toward achieving concrete results.

By precisely aligning these metrics with your company's core objectives, you ensure that every initiative and action within your operational plan directly contributes to achieving tangible results.

An aligned operational plan makes it easier to:

• Communicate roles and responsibilities to all employees so they know how their efforts contribute to overall business success.
• Identify and address operational bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could derail strategy execution.
• Motivate and engage employees to work toward strategic objectives and deliver on business outcomes.

Remember that the role of operations is to close the gap between your organization's strategic goals and what is being done on a daily basis to make them happen.

👉🏻 How Cascade can help:

With Cascade’s Metrics Library , you can bring your operating and financial business-level goals together with your strategy under one single roof. This makes reporting & governance easy, accurate, and less time-consuming by connecting your business data to your key business initiatives.

Through Cascade’s integrations , you can consolidate your metrics in one place, importing your data directly from business systems, data lakes, BI tools, or even spreadsheets.

Define the focus areas of your operational plan

The focus areas of your operational plan are the key areas of the business that the plan will address.

This will depend on your business plan. Think about how the business operates and how it succeeds. Do you need to pursue short-term cost reductions while simultaneously pursuing longer-term growth and transformation initiatives? Your operational plans must be built on these strategic priorities.

For example, you can prioritize your focus areas based on the most relevant business strategies or by specific departments. Some examples of focus areas could be:

• Administration
• Human Resources

💡Tips to help define the focus areas of your operational plan:

• Identify the business's key challenges and opportunities.
• Consider the business's overall long-term strategy and key metrics and how the operational plan's focus areas can support these objectives.
• Bring other people on board to help you identify what needs to be addressed by the operations plan.

Create strategic objectives for your operational plan

Strategic objectives are specific goals aligned with the operation’s strategy and focus areas. They represent what you want to achieve in each focus area and will serve as the building blocks of your plan, ensuring that it’s focused and actionable.

Some examples of strategic objectives:

• Reduce costs by 10% within the next year by implementing more efficient processes and streamlining the supply chain over the next year.
• Launch three new products in the next fiscal year to expand your product lines and increase revenue.
• Increase customer satisfaction scores by 5% within the next six months.

💡Tips for defining strategic objectives include:

• Ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
• Consistently align objectives with your operational plan's focus areas and the company's goals.
• Don’t be afraid to get input from other people about your objectives.

Identify and prioritize projects

It’s time to identify and prioritize the projects that need to be executed. Remember, projects are action plans to help you achieve your strategic objectives.

Project planning should include thinking about time frames, task assignments, and deliverables (and prioritizing).

Here are some examples of project ideas:

• Localize sourcing for critical semi-finished materials.
• Streamline the supply chain to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Find and develop an alternative logistics channel.
• Implement a new customer service training program to improve customer satisfaction scores.
• Implement a new technology that will enable end-to-end supply chain visibility.

💡Tips for defining and prioritizing projects:

• Identify the specific actions and activities needed to achieve each strategic objective.
• Prioritize the projects based on their importance, feasibility, and potential impact on the business.
• Involve stakeholders in defining and prioritizing the projects to ensure their needs and concerns are heard.

Identify and track key performance indicators (KPIs)

Finally, you’ll need to know if your operational plan and day-to-day activities result in outcomes.

Set KPIs for key initiatives and strategic objectives to measure success, ensure alignment, and identify performance gaps in your operational plan.

Some examples of operations KPIs are:

• Inventory costs
• Costs of goods sold
• Revenue growth
• Employee retention rate
• Customer satisfaction score

💡Tips for defining and tracking KPIs:

• Align KPIs with your strategic objectives and focus areas so that you can track the plan's progress against these specific goals.
• Add both lagging and leading indicators .
• Instead of using multiple disconnected spreadsheets and project management tools, consider live dashboards or reporting systems to track the KPIs and monitor progress over time.

👉🏻 How Cascade can help build your plan:

Cascade’s planner feature enables you to build your operational plan with structure and ease by breaking down the complexity from high-level initiatives to executable outcomes. Define your key elements (focus areas, objectives, projects, and KPIs), and share the plan with your teams. You’ll get full visibility of the plan’s progress in real-time, allowing you to identify gaps, quickly update the plan, and communicate the change with your team with a single click.

👉🏻 If you don’t want to start building the plan from scratch, use our free Operational Plan Template pre-filled with examples of focus areas, objectives, projects, and KPIs that you can customize to meet your organization’s needs.

Operational Plan Examples & Templates

Here are five operational plan examples to help you create plans for your teams. You can use one master operational plan or set up an operational plan for each department.

Master Operational Plan Example

This Operational Plan Template will help you close the gap between business goals and day-to-day operations. You'll be able to set goals and KPIs for your top priorities and work with the operations team to deliver operational excellence and business results.

HR Plan Example

This HR Operational Plan Template can be used to meet staffing requirements, manage human capital and align human resources activities with your strategy. HR managers in any industry can create a clear operational plan that can be constantly monitored, adapted, and improved.

IT Plan Example

If you’re in the IT team, try out this IT Plan Template to get your IT operational planning up and running fast. It comes prefilled with focus areas and KPIs relevant to IT operations; you can easily customize workflows and deliverables to your needs.

Marketing Plan Example

This Marketing Plan Template can help you efficiently understand and plan your digital marketing operations using best practices. Use it to quickly set up priorities and get your social media and marketing teams moving on tasks that will make an impact.

Finance Plan Example

This finance-focused template is ideal if you want to get on top of your finance operations plan. Use it to allocate and distribute financial resources across your organization and get real-time updates through your dashboard and reports—which are great tools to create a visually compelling financial summary that clearly shows your key metrics.

💡Pro Tip: To ensure successful execution, it's crucial to align not just your master operational plan with your overarching strategic plan, but also all the operational department plans.

With the Alignment Maps feature, you’ll be able to visualize how your top-level business strategy breaks down into functional and operational plans. This empowers COOs and CFOs to consolidate their operational plans in one place, creating tighter alignment between the finance and operations teams and improving cross-collaboration to build more resilient operations.

Want to dig deeper? Use the Relationships feature to see the relationships between connected objectives from your plans and understand how your different department goals contribute to the core business metrics and goals. This view will allow you to clearly map dependencies, blockers, and risks that may lie along your journey.

5 Tips For An Effective Operational Plan And Its Execution

1. don’t underestimate the power of transparent communication.

Regularly communicate the operational plan and progress to all relevant stakeholders to build the necessary buy-in and support. Your employees must know your goals and the roadmap, and team members should understand their role in its execution. This business transparency will help everyone row in the same direction.

“Clarity regarding strategy is one of the key drivers of autonomous execution. If people understand what you’re working toward and have guardrails in place, they can be empowered to make their own decisions and don’t need everything to be ‘run up the chain’ to get approved. This allows you to move fast and at scale.” — Sam Sterling , Chief Strategy Officer, Akqa

2. Keep moving forward and adopt a growth mindset

Keep the momentum going and ensure that the plan is executed effectively. Regular monitoring and reviews can help identify and address any challenges or obstacles that may arise.

Schedule regular reviews and check-ins and provide the necessary support to ensure projects are on track and moving forward.

“I think adopting a growth mindset is super important. This means having the confidence to fail fast, try something new and empower people to do that.” — Ken Miller , General Manager, Azure Intelligent Cloud at Microsoft

With the Team Updates functionality, every team member can post updates on key measures, actions, and objectives. This will give you real-time visibility into performance and help you identify possible risks before it’s too late—without having to schedule extra meetings or nag your team members for updates.

3. Make strategic moves and change fast when you need to

Your operational plan should be flexible, adaptable, and open to adjustments. This means keeping an eye on progress, making corrections if needed, and being willing to adapt the plan to changing circumstances or new opportunities. As McKinsey suggests, you can consider creating a team that will be able to collect data, link analysis with action, and offer quick responses to rapid changes.

“Traditionally, companies would have taken that piece of paper and gone out and said: we're going to execute it, start to finish. Then get into the formulation of the strategy, what we need to hit, and what the end product result will be like. But what we do know is that’s never the case. Along the way, you're going to have bumps, and inevitably, you’ll need to change from that original picture.” — Annie Lucchitti , Marketing Manager, Unilever

4. Empower your operations team and boost efficiency

Effective operational planning requires the engagement and empowerment of your team. Involve stakeholders in the planning process and provide them with the necessary resources. Give them context and an opportunity to set goals and prioritize initiatives. This will help you boost engagement and hold them accountable for progress.

“I think it just works at every single level. Are people allowed to be themselves at work? Personally, are they at peace? Are they happy? Productivity happens when people have the right skills, but also when they are engaged and happy. If one of those fails a bit, productivity will start decreasing.” — Joan Torrents , Global Sourcing Manager, TESCO.

5. If it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed

Don’t underestimate the importance of tracking and measuring progress against the operational plan's goals and objectives. Set milestones, enforce KPIs, and stay on top of progress. Doing this will help you stay on course, empower you to act quickly, and provide valuable insights into what is going wrong.

“Data is a foundational element in the strategy definition phase as well as in the strategy execution phase as it helps create a baseline, identify key priorities, set goals, and measure progress.” — Erica Santoni , Principal, Diversity Equity & Inclusion, Intuit

Use Cascade’s Dashboards to monitor your day-to-day progress on key metrics and critical business and strategic information in real-time.

Compile the information in powerful reports and executive summaries in seconds with pre-built templates. Share them with your key stakeholders —internal and external— and invite them to collaborate on your strategy together.

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What good is an operational plan if no one executes it? If your organization wants to operate at a higher level, static tools like Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, Google Docs, and/or project management tools aren’t the solution.

❌They aren’t designed for adaptive strategy and planning.

❌They often lead to siloing and hinder effective cross-collaboration.

❌They make it challenging to measure progress and slow down decision-making.

With Cascade as your central operating system, you can stop running business operations blindfolded and embrace rapid, coordinated, and data-driven decision-making.

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Operational planning: 5 steps to create a better business operational plan

Learn how to conduct operational planning to enhance collaboration, streamline workflows, and unlock peak productivity in all your company’s teams.

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Operational planning enhances collaboration and streamlines workflows to unlock peak efficiency.

Transforming a strategic vision into business success demands meticulous planning. It requires navigating unexpected obstacles, coordinating team activities with long-term goals, and implementing practical steps to realize organizational objectives.

Organizational planning plays a pivotal role in this context by translating high-level strategies into actionable day-to-day tasks.

But an operational plan is more than a structured to-do list — it’s a comprehensive framework that outlines roles, responsibilities, and timelines. By breaking down grand strategies into executable actions, operational planning ensures cohesive teamwork and transforms ambiguous business strategies into achievable realities.

What’s operational planning?

Operational planning is how companies organize day-to-day tasks to align with broader strategic goals. It’s a road map guiding teams through operational decisions about daily operations, ensuring every task contributes to the company’s long-term and high-level objectives. This typically involves setting short-term objectives, defining key activities, and establishing clear timelines.

In practice, operational planning often blends traditional and innovative methods to maximize efficiency. Conventional strategies like Gantt charts and flowcharts help leaders visualize data , tasks, and timelines to make complex projects more manageable. And digital tools like enterprise project management software introduce automation, real-time collaboration, and data analytics into the mix. These platforms enable agile plan adjustments and offer insights through predictive analytics.

By integrating these mixed methodologies, operational planning helps enterprises build a system that’s efficient and responsive to evolving business needs. It bridges the gap between meticulous organization and the agility needed in a fast-paced business environment.

Benefits of operational planning

Operational planning offers a structured approach to decision-making, but its advantages extend beyond planning. Here’s why it’s a crucial tool for achieving organizational goals.

Clarifies goals

Operational planning turns abstract ideas into concrete objectives. It encourages setting explicit goals with definitive timelines. This clarity benefits leadership and the entire team, ensuring everyone understands what needs doing, who’s doing it, and by when.

Enhances productivity

An operational plan enhances productivity by establishing timelines, outlining objectives, and allocating resources. This structure helps team members prioritize their work and manage their time efficiently because they have clear deadlines to guide them.

By defining precise objectives, the plan ensures every team member understands their specific tasks and expected outcomes, preventing unnecessary work and deviations from the plan. And knowing what resources are available helps team members prepare realistically for their taskwork.

Improves efficiency

A well-crafted operational plan boosts efficiency by optimizing workflows and streamlining organizational processes . By mapping out immediate and long-term objectives, the plan establishes a clear blueprint for task execution. As team members better understand their roles, task sequence, and the rationale behind each, they can execute them more seamlessly. This clarity and structure are also invaluable for onboarding new team members and allow them to integrate and understand the workflow with less friction.

Strategic planning vs. operational planning

Both plan types are distinct yet essential components of an organization’s overall planning process. Let’s break down the primary differences:

• A strategic plan defines your company’s “what,” outlines your business’s direction, and sets broad, long-term objectives. It’s a high-level overview that articulates your mission statement, establishes key business objectives, and outlines strategies for achieving them. This plan typically spans several years into the future and aligns the company’s efforts with its overarching vision.
• An operational plan focuses on the “how” by detailing how to execute the strategies and goals laid out in the strategic plan. This is where you get into the specifics — setting milestones, crafting a detailed road map, and establishing short-term, incremental goals that steer your company toward achieving strategic objectives. And at this point, you’ll focus on more immediate factors, like dealing with daily management and task implementation, that are necessary to achieve strategic organizational goals.

Types of operational plans

Departmental goals and needs vary significantly, and tailored operational plans ensure you optimally manage each area. While a sales department might need a plan focused on customer engagement and retention, an IT department might emphasize technology upgrades and cybersecurity . Combining various plan types — like a couple of those that follow — ensures optimal management and effectiveness in each area, aligning departmental activities with broader objectives.

Project operation plans

Project operation plans are indispensable documents for breaking projects into actionable milestones and assigning teams to relevant tasks. A well-developed project plan organizes tasks and anticipates resource requirements such as personnel, infrastructure, and time. By identifying these requirements early on, project operation plans provide planning foresight that helps avoid resource shortages and last-minute scrambles to ensure projects progress smoothly and stay on track.

Say you’re designing a website . Your project operation plan will outline key steps, such as user research , wireframing , user testing , and launch. Each step would have assigned teams, deadlines, and specific objectives, like establishing focus groups by a certain date and finalizing prototypes. The project manager would monitor progress to ensure resource availability and timeline adherence.

Enterprise operation plans

Enterprise operation plans translate broader strategic goals into smaller, manageable milestones. They involve assigning responsibility for these milestones to department directors to ensure accountability for each plan segment.

When creating an enterprise operational plan, it’s vital to identify resource gaps, dependencies, and other potential obstacles to ensure seamless execution. This lets you set realistic, achievable milestones and achieve smooth interdepartmental coordination. Involving directors from the start is also crucial because their insights can reveal critical aspects you might otherwise overlook.

Consider a web design agency planning to expand their service offerings to include mobile app development over the next year. The enterprise operational plan might include milestones such as hiring app developers, training current staff in responsive mobile design , and marketing these new services to potential leads. You might also ask the development head to oversee recruitment and training and involve the marketing director in developing strategies to promote the new services.

IT operation plans

IT departments confront unique challenges due to rapid cybersecurity threats and their critical role in every business sector. Unlike other departments focusing on sales and marketing, IT departments must ensure the organization’s technological structure is robust, secure, and current.

IT operation plans typically outline how the department will adapt to business changes, like scaling up for new hires, migrating from a legacy system to a new one, and safeguarding the organization against evolving cybersecurity threats.

If you’re preparing for a major server infrastructure upgrade, for instance, an IT operation plan will outline steps like evaluating current server and hosting capacities, selecting new hardware and infrastructure, and scheduling website migration to new servers. The plan would include specific timelines — such as completing server evaluations by the end of the first quarter and starting the migration in the second quarter — to ensure minimal downtime and a smooth transition for all hosted websites.

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Key elements of an operational plan

No matter the type you’re creating, most operational plans include the following core traits.

Operational plans should be clear and to the point. While comprehensive coverage is important, elaborating too much risks misinterpretation and becoming bogged down in the details. Focus on concise, direct explanations and allow the details to unfold during project execution.

Team buy-in is essential for success. Instead of leaving the executive team to dictate the plan exclusively, involve team members in its creation. A collaborative approach helps garner buy-in and fosters feelings of ownership and responsibility toward the plan’s objectives. This involvement translates to increased motivation and commitment because team members feel more likely to invest effort in a plan they helped shape.

Consistency

Consistency in operational plans is crucial for their effectiveness and for establishing organizational trust. It involves applying the same standards and procedures uniformly across all departments and teams. By consistently applying rules and policies, you ensure every organizational element operates under the same guidelines, enhancing fairness and reducing confusion. Consistent execution of your operational plan also streamlines progress and success tracking because the criteria and methods used for each remain uniform.

Specify the processes and methodologies each department should use. If the design team uses an agile, iterative process , for instance, implement similar practices in other departments like IT. This standardization enables smoother collaboration and operational harmony.

Key performance indicators

Every operational plan needs well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) from the outset. These should include:

• Leading indicators provide early insights into your strategy’s effectiveness by signaling shifts and trends ahead of their full realization. By monitoring these indicators, you can gauge your strategy’s immediate impact and proactively adjust your approach. Indicator examples include customer satisfaction levels, changes in market share, and fluctuations in sales figures.
• Lagging indicators reflect the outcomes of your operational efforts by providing historical data on your plan’s efficacy after execution. Key lagging indicators include metrics like the time taken to complete projects, support ticket volumes, and total expenses incurred. Analyzing these metrics also helps identify improvement areas, like optimizing resource allocation, enhancing customer support processes, and streamlining operational workflows.

Constraints

Acknowledge any assumptions and constraints within your plan, such as technological limitations, tight deadlines, and regulatory requirements. Being upfront about these factors is essential for setting realistic expectations and guiding effective task execution. And it ensures everyone involved understands the framework they’re operating in.

Say you’re building an agency website in the European Union (EU). A critical constraint would be compliance with data protection regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You must keep this constraint in mind as you develop your operational plan because it affects the technology and processes used for data handling and shapes your website’s design and functionality. For instance, you’ll likely need to integrate clear consent mechanisms for data collection, prominent user data management tools into the website’s layout, and GDPR-compliant technologies for data processing and storage.

The 5 steps of the operational planning process

Enterprises develop operational plans through five strategic steps, each essential for shaping an actionable and effective strategy. Let’s explore what this planning process looks like.

1. Set goals

Establish specific, immediate business goals that align with your strategic plan. This might include launching a redesigned website, increasing online sales by a specific percentage, or reducing digital marketing expenses.

Make these goals ambitious yet adaptable, allowing for flexible responses to unexpected challenges. This step lays the foundation for your operational strategy and aligns every subsequent action toward these well-defined objectives.

2. Allocate resources

After establishing your goals, evaluate your capacity to achieve them. Analyze your current resources and identify what additional expertise, technology, and budget you require. This step isn’t just about highlighting what’s missing — it’s about strategizing how to scale your business to accommodate these needs.

3. Define KPIs

Select KPIs that align closely with your operational goals and ensure they reflect key aspects of your strategy. These KPIs should include leading indicators, like website traffic and user engagement rates for predictive analytics, and lagging indicators, such as satisfaction scores post-launch, to evaluate past performance. Consistently apply these KPIs throughout your project to monitor progress and keep the team focused on core objectives.

Consider using digital analytic platforms like Google Analytics to track KPIs. These tools offer detailed insights into traffic and user behavior. And you can set up dashboards to visually represent these metrics to help spot trends and patterns without combing through data.

Suppose you notice rising bounce rates on a specific webpage — this might indicate user disinterest or navigational issues. In response, you might pivot to revise the page’s copy, restructure its visual hierarchy , or simplify the navigation structure to make it more engaging and user-friendly.

4. Prescribe processes

Develop clear and detailed plans for how your teams should execute tasks. This clarity guides them through each stage, reducing confusion, ensuring consistency, and enhancing productivity.

To communicate these procedures to your team, use tools like flowcharts. They simplify and clarify each operational plan phase and help ensure everyone understands their responsibilities.

For large-scale projects, consider using project management software like Asana, Trello, or Jira. These platforms offer features like task assignment, deadline tracking, and real-time communication, and they provide a centralized platform for monitoring progress and maintaining team alignment.

5. Determine milestones

Create a road map that outlines clear, measurable goals and specific objectives. This map transforms your operational plan into achievable targets, helping teams visualize where they’re headed and the benchmarks they need to hit. Host regular meetings when outlining your milestones — this consistent evaluation ensures everyone moves forward in sync, maintaining the necessary momentum to achieve the plan’s goals.

In a web development project, for example, these evaluations might reveal if certain phases, like design or development, have too few or surplus resources. Identifying these imbalances lets you efficiently reallocate resources to ensure each department has what it needs to meet its milestones effectively and on schedule.

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Learn how Webflow Enterprise can be a part of your operational strategy, and harness a visual-first design platform that lets you create and adapt web content in real time.

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Create an Operational Plan that Makes an Impact

Companies often confuse strategic, tactical, and operational planning. Strategic planning sets your organization’s long-term vision and goals. Tactical planning is the process of figuring out how to achieve your strategic plan. And operational planning links the two, outlining the procedural steps you’ll take to meet your goals. A sound operational plan is critical for achieving success in your organization.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of creating actionable steps that your team can take to meet the goals in your strategic plan. An operational plan outlines daily, weekly, and monthly tasks for each department or employee. During operational planning, you’ll also create milestones that help you achieve your strategic plan. For example, if your strategic plan aims to grow your customer base by 20%, your operational plan will include incremental steps to gain new leads and customers.

What Are the Benefits of an Operational Plan?

A well-constructed operational plan makes everyone’s jobs easier. The benefits include:

• Clear guidance: With actionable steps for each department, operational plans help teams understand if they are performing well or need to improve.
• Better workflow : Each team knows what they’ll be working on over the month or quarter, and they can adjust their workflow as needed.
• Improves morale : All employees can see how their day-to-day work connects to the company’s broader goals.

Creating an Effective Operational Plan

Operational plans help you hit strategic goals, so start by reviewing your strategic plan. Your operational plan should be specific to a department or team, so your organization will likely have more than one operational plan. Identify the key stakeholders for a particular team: they’ll be best suited to develop the plan, which should include:

• Departmental objectives
• Key performance indicators
• Staffing and budget needs
• Process for tracking and reporting on progress

Once the plan is complete, you can replicate this process for each department. Plans should be shared department-wide for feedback and questions.

Operational Goals

Also referred to as departmental goals or objectives, operational goals are the short-term targets that your organization wants to hit. An operational plan includes operational goals and the steps to achieve them. Typically, organizational goals are:

• Tied to a specific department or team
• Tied to a budget line or item
• Tied to a specific short time frame, such as a month or a quarter

Operational Goals Examples

All operational goals should be measurable and actionable. Actionable means your team can achieve them – so the goal cannot be dependent on an outside factor. For example, your IT team may be tasked with training 10 new employees on security best practices each quarter. But if 10 employees aren’t hired in a particular quarter, that operational goal is not actionable.

To be measurable, there must be a clear way to tell if you met your operational goal or not. For example, one operational goal for an accounting team might be to process invoices more quickly. Their accounting software should be able to collect data on how quickly invoices are processed and paid, so the team can measure their performance over time and see if they are working more efficiently.

Share Your Operational Plan

An operational plan shouldn’t be static – it’s a living document. As time goes on, you may need to adjust your operational goals. That isn’t a sign of failure – it means you’re doing a better job of understanding how each team functions and setting your targets accordingly. You should keep your plan up to date and revisit it regularly, whether once a year or at the end of each fiscal quarter. Include key stakeholders in this process so that the plan works for everyone.

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Creating an operational plan might seem challenging at first – but once you get started, it can help all your teams run more smoothly. See how Spider Impact helps you define, measure, manage and report on your operational goals. Click for a free test drive or demo .

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Operational Planning: How to Make an Operational Plan

June 6, 2022 - 10 min read

Having a strategic plan is essential to any company, but it’s not enough. To ensure that the broader organizational goals are within reach, you need an operational plan for day-to-day work. 

Using templates to manage your operation plan can help simplify your complex processes and save you time. You know how a shopping list helps you remember what to buy at the store? Templates are like that for your work. And Wrike has many templates ready to go for different kinds of jobs. 

For example, you can use the retail trade template to see what step comes next when adding something new for customers to buy. Then there’s the business operations templates , which helps you and your team keep track of your business plan without getting wires crossed. And when you need to manage bills, you can use the invoice tracking template . All these templates are great tools for keeping an operational plan ticking over.

In this blog post, we’ll explain what an operational plan is, show you how to create one without feeling overwhelmed, and provide you with an example of an operational plan. We’ll also share our prebuilt templates to get you up and running quickly.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan is a document that outlines the key objectives and goals of an organization and how to reach them.

The document includes short-term or long-term goals in a clear way so that team members know their responsibilities and have a clear understanding of what needs to be done.

Crafting an operational plan keeps teams on track while guiding them in making crucial decisions about the company's long-term strategy.

Operational planning vs strategic planning

Though related to each other, these two planning strategies differ in their focus.

Operational planning is the process of the day-to-day work to execute your strategy. It ensures you have all the resources and staff necessary to get work done efficiently.

On the other hand, strategic planning is about looking ahead into the future, identifying the upcoming pipeline, and figuring out how you can prepare for it.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, nearly 7 million Americans are self-employed, with an additional 10 million employed by small businesses. 

If you're working at a large corporation, chances are your company will have some form of strategic goals in place. However, if you're one of the millions who work remotely and independently, your success will rely on operational planning instead.

What are the key elements of an operational plan?

The success of operational planning largely depends on setting realistic expectations for all teams.

Here are the key elements of a functional operational plan:

• Clearly define the ultimate vision or objective for the plan
• Review and break down the smaller goals for the operating budget, team, and resources required to put the plan into action
• Assign budgets, team members, key stakeholders, and resources
• Monitor progress with consistent reports
• Refine the operational plan and be ready to pivot if needed

Ensure all teams understand the parameters of success. Doing this shows how their work contributes to wider company goals and ensures better decision-making for the business operation.

How to create an operational planning process

Think of an operational plan as a key component in a team puzzle. It provides employees with a manual on how to operate the company.

It should be created in tandem with other foundational documents like an organizational mission statement, vision document, or business strategy. Daily, it can help answer questions such as:

• Who should be working on what?
• How can we mitigate those risks?
• How will resources be assigned for different tasks?
• Are there any internal and external risks facing the business?

To create a successful operational plan, it's important to define goals clearly. Here are several steps that will help you develop a functional operating plan:

Start with the strategic plan

Before defining an operational goal, make sure your strategic objectives are in place and relevant.

Prioritize the most critical activities first

Once these goals have been decided on, prioritize the most critical activities required to achieve these aims.

Stop diluting team efforts and let them focus on the most important goals first. Doing this means everyone works on a smaller set of tasks, instead of spreading themselves thin in multiple areas. It also helps in optimizing available resources.

Use predictive indicators

For a robust operational plan, consider using key performance metrics or indicators that can help you determine project progress and lend visibility to team activities. 

While lagging indicators look backward, leading indicators look to the future. Think of the plan as a car — the rear-view mirror would be a lagging indicator, while the windshield would be the leading indicator.

A leading indicator could be a new product, higher customer satisfaction levels, or new markets. Examples of lagging indicators include the number of people who attended an event or the monthly operating expenses for specific departments. 

Instead of lagging indicators, use leading indicators. Lagging metrics will show that your efforts are falling short only after you execute the operations.

Leading KPIs include predictive measures that allow early identification of problems before they become critical and impact business performance negatively.

Get team buy-in

The key to defining appropriate KPIs is involving the whole team in the process. Meet to discuss the business goals and figure out what measurements are right for the team instead of working independently or outsourcing them.

Ensure consistent communication

Communication is key. By understanding your company's metrics and what they mean, you'll be able to work together more effectively with colleagues to reach common goals.

Operational plan example

Let’s say that a company plans to increase production volume by 50% at the end of a fiscal year.

When the company goal is clear, the team will make a strategic plan with three main components: marketing, sales, and operations.

This can be further broken down into an operational plan, which will assign resources, teams, budgets, and timelines for different departments such as manufacturing, sourcing, accounts, finance, and logistics to achieve the increase in production. Such a plan should include a financial summary and financial projections as well.

Operational plan template

Think about the example above. The goals and parties involved are clear as part of the operational plan. At the same time, to remain on track, the plan requires continuous analysis and reviews. An operational plan template can be extremely helpful to achieve that.

An operational template can be a simple document that is reused for different plans by the same organization. However, it is also possible and extremely helpful to make use of project management software tools to create one.

For instance, Gantt charts can serve exactly that purpose. Using a Gantt chart as an operational plan template, it is possible to create and manage plans, track changes and edit project-related activities in real time. The chart allows clear visibility for timelines, tasks, responsibilities, and team members.

Operational planning advantages and disadvantages

Most businesses utilize an operational plan to keep track of their daily tasks. 

The plan outlines the day-to-day activities for running the organization — teams, managers, and employees are then able to visualize their contribution, which is crucial for reaching company goals.

But every process has two sides. Let’s review the operational planning advantages and disadvantages in more detail.

Operational planning advantages

Clarifies organizational goals.

An operational plan helps managers and department heads define their daily tasks, responsibilities, and activities in detail.

It also illustrates how individual team members contribute to the overall company or department goals. Without a clearly defined plan, managers and employees have no way to measure their daily tasks against predefined outcomes.

Boosts team productivity

Business owners are always looking for ways to increase productivity, which in turn translates into higher profits. One of the best and easiest ways to boost efficiency is through an operational plan.

Employees are more productive when they know their daily objectives and responsibilities. Conversely, if they're unsure of what is required of them, chances are their productivity will suffer. 

An operational plan provides this vital information to employees in each department and across the company as a whole.

Enhance organizational profitability

Having a plan helps in keeping projects and teams on track.

When operations are managed properly, teams are able to consistently increase revenue and develop new products.

Innovation pays off. A BCG survey points out that 60% of companies that are committed to innovation report steadily increasing revenues year after year. With an operational plan in place, teams are able to innovate better and faster.

Improves competitive advantages

Competitive advantages are made up of multiple levels and components.

Coordinating the different parts with an operational plan will make your workflows run more smoothly. This allows you to deliver high-quality deliverables on time, creating an outstanding customer experience and keeping you ahead of the competition.

Operational planning disadvantages

Possibility of human error.

Human error is a common problem in manufacturing that can often occur when transitioning from production to sale.

Operations management teams will need to coordinate effectively with diverse cross-functional teams such as finance, accounting, engineering, and human resources. In doing so, each team will have a clear understanding of the end goals of each department.

Interdependency amongst parts

One of the main disadvantages of implementing an operations planning process is that its success depends on coordination across parts.

Plans end up failing due to one part not working, which can have an adverse impact on the subsequent process. Disruptions in one process can end up affecting the entire process, making the entire operational plan useless.

Using Wrike for operational planning

Boost your organization’s efficiency by ensuring every project starts off on the right foot. Wrike’s award-winning project management tools can help you create and execute operational plans with various prebuilt templates . 

Establish your plan, monitor progress, and be prepared to pivot if necessary. With Wrike, you can share real-time data, making all milestones crystal clear for your team and helping them stay updated and on track.

These templates keep processes running smoothly so you can focus on doing your work well. Want to try them out? They’re just a click away.  

Choose the most suitable template and start a free two-week trial of Wrike today!

Yuvika Iyer

Yuvika is a freelance writer who specializes in recruitment and resume writing.

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Work Skills You Need on Your Resume in 2021

Navigating the highly competitive job market can be brutal. In a recent Jobvite survey, nearly three in four respondents said they believe finding a job has become much harder following the pandemic.  It’s clearer now more than ever how important it is for your resume to stand out. In fact, nearly 24% of hiring managers spend 30 seconds or less reviewing a resume to determine whether a candidate is qualified for a position or not. You quite literally have seconds to catch their attention before your resume ends up in the recycling bin with the rest of the candidates that didn’t make the cut. So, how exactly do you set yourself apart and stand out from the crowd? Highlighting your work skills on your resume is the best place to start. We did some digging and pulled together some work skills examples in various categories to inspire you to revitalize your resume.  Important social work skills for the workplace What are social work skills? Social skills, otherwise known as interpersonal skills, are essential in helping us communicate with one another in the workplace. These skills allow us to build relationships, interact, and communicate with those around us in a meaningful and effective way. This includes verbal and nonverbal cues.  Social work skills are essential in every job. Whether you work on a team, are in a client-facing role, or are an individual contributor reporting to a direct manager, solid social skills will help you succeed in your position.  Let’s take a look at some of the most important social work skills for the workplace:  1. Empathy One of the best ways to interact well with others is to put yourself in their shoes and understand how they feel. Empathetic people can understand how others are feeling and can identify with those feelings in some way.  Having empathy is a vital trait, especially for those who hold leadership positions. Being empathetic isn’t something you can force, and it doesn’t happen overnight if it doesn’t come naturally to you. This skill takes a conscious effort to build and will help you forge and maintain stronger workplace relationships. 2. Active listening Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation with a colleague and felt like they weren’t paying attention to a single word you were saying? Or have you ever been chatting with a coworker and felt like they heard you and gave you their utmost attention? The latter is known as active listening.  Active listening involves giving someone your full, undivided attention and it allows you to build trust and strong relationships with your colleagues and clients. Active listening requires practice, but it is a skill that can be acquired with proper training and effort. 3. Emotional intelligence At a high level, emotional intelligence refers to recognizing and being aware of the emotions of both yourself and other people. Those with high emotional intelligence are known for being self-aware and can practice self-regulation, particularly in stressful and potentially overwhelming situations at work. Emotional intelligence is critical in the workplace because it contributes to strong, long-term relationships and can help you manage and appropriately tailor your reactions.  4. Conflict resolution According to recent research, 65% of workers experienced conflict with another coworker. Conflict is inevitable in the workplace, which means developing a solid set of conflict resolution skills can help you manage and navigate these situations efficiently.  Conflict resolution is the ability to address the root cause of disagreements and devise a solution that works for all parties involved. You can use various techniques to help resolve conflicts, so it’s essential to learn and understand how to address different disputes. 5. Written communication Social skills refer to how we communicate with one another, which means written skills are a must. Some forms of written communication include emails, instant messages, documents, reports, slide decks, and your resume. Using appropriate grammar, proper spelling, and following formatting guidelines will allow you to communicate effectively with others. 6. Nonverbal communication When it comes to communication, it’s easy to think about what we are saying, but we don’t always focus on how we are saying it. Nonverbal skills can dramatically impact the way your message is received.  Your body language, eye contact, facial expressions, and tone can completely change the message you are trying to deliver to your coworkers. It’s important to be aware of these subtle cues so that you can make sure your message isn’t misconstrued or misinterpreted.  Work-related skills for virtual environments You might not be working with your colleagues side-by-side in the same office. In addition to the skills we discussed above, remote work requires some different skills and disciplines.  Below are a few competencies that you’ll definitely want to have when collaborating in virtual work environments:  Self-motivation: There’s a big difference between in-person office environments and virtual workplace settings. At the office, your manager can simply stop by your desk or quickly check in to see how things are going. While your supervisor can technically do the same via email or instant message, you ultimately don’t have anyone looking over your shoulder 24/7 at your home office (unless you have pets, children, or spouses nearby!). That means self-motivation and knowing how to hold yourself accountable to get your work done are vital to helping you thrive in a virtual role. Adaptability: Adaptability is beneficial in any setting, but it’s a particularly beneficial skill in virtual environments. Whether you’re working with a distributed team and constantly trying to navigate time zones or your presentation gets interrupted due to an unreliable internet connection, adaptability is an important skill to help you navigate the unexpected and ever-changing conditions you may find yourself running up against. Digital and technical knowledge: In virtual environments, employees work remotely and generally rely on several tools to collaborate and tackle their to-do lists. Between project management software, instant messaging, video conferencing, document sharing, and email, there are many different technologies to navigate daily. If you’re working in a virtual environment, it’s essential to feel comfortable using these platforms if you want to keep up with the pace of your work. It’s also worth mentioning that, while you still may be able to reach the IT help desk, you may not receive assistance as quickly as you would in an office setting. That means you might have to do some troubleshooting and problem-solving on your own. What teamwork skills are important for 2021? Teamwork makes the dream work, right?  Teamwork skills are a subset of skills that enable us to work well with groups of people (meaning, our teams) to achieve a shared goal or outcome. In 2021 and beyond, as we see a shift toward hybrid work models, honing in on your teamwork skills can help you land your dream gig. Here are the teamwork skills that are important to develop for 2021 and beyond: 1. Reliability Being reliable is arguably the most crucial teamwork skill. Those who are reliable can be depended on and trusted to do their part time and time again. They show a certain level of commitment to their work and colleagues, meet deadlines (or even get work in early), and follow through on any action or task they say they will do.  You want to be a reliable teammate so your colleagues and your employer will have faith in you. And the more trustworthy you are, the more responsibility you will be trusted with over time, which may boost your career growth in the long run. It’s even more important to showcase your reliability in a virtual workplace environment through clear and frequent communication. 2. Accountability Accountability goes hand-in-hand with reliability. But beyond being reliable, accountability is all about taking responsibility for one’s work — even when that includes mistakes or failures.  There’s no room for the blame game or pointing fingers on teams that work well with one another, which means you have to hold yourself accountable and take fault when necessary. Your teammates will likely think more of you if you’re willing to admit you’re wrong, as opposed to constantly shifting blame or pointing fingers when issues arise. 3. Respectfulness A little bit of respect goes a long way, especially at work. According to Indeed, respectfulness in the workplace reduces stress, increases productivity and collaboration, improves employee satisfaction, and creates a fair environment. You need to respect your team members, manager, and clients to do your best work together.  Acts of respect include acknowledging others and calling them by name, encouraging and exchanging opinions and ideas without judgment, giving credit where it’s due, and listening to and understanding your teammates. 4. Collaboration There is no successful teamwork without collaboration. Collaboration is working together with one or more people on a project or toward a shared goal.  When employees can work together and collaborate successfully, they can share ideas and come up with practical solutions to complex problems. Brainstorming, open discussions, workshops, and knowledge sharing sessions are all examples of collaboration that lead to great teamwork.  5. Persuasion Have you ever worked with a teammate who insists on working their way, even if the rest of the team agrees to pursue another route? How do you keep making progress on your project or goal if one team member isn’t on the same page? That’s where your skills of persuasion come in handy.  Sometimes you might have to persuade a team member to see another point of view and change their mind to benefit the rest of the group. But persuasive skills are more than just getting someone to change their mind and see your perspective — it’s about doing so in an empathetic and respectful way in order to maintain a healthy working relationship. 6. Constructive feedback for improvement You should be able to offer your teammate constructive feedback to help them improve and vice versa. Exchanging feedback not only benefits individuals and the team as a whole but also adds value to your organization by creating an opportunity for constant growth.  Giving feedback requires offering suggestions for improvement in a positive way, while receiving feedback requires listening with an open mind and a willingness to change.  Work skills that work on any resume Sure, there are specialized skills for different roles and industries. Engineers add their programming skills to their resume, project managers add project management certifications and relevant skills, and HR professionals add the performance management and HRIS systems they’ve previously used. While there are specialized skills you’ll want to emphasize on your resume based on your industry and role (and trust us, those are important), there are also some work skills that are relevant on any resume. These include:  Creativity: Creativity is an essential component of innovation and complex problem-solving. In its most basic form, creativity requires thinking about a problem or task differently and using your imagination to form and test new ideas. Problem-solving: All employers value problem-solving abilities because they want to hire people who can break down problems and develop effective solutions. To showcase your problem-solving skills, you might possess a range of qualities such as analysis, evaluation, decision-making, and communication. Time management: No employer wants to hire someone who doesn’t make good use of their time and will have a hard time getting their work done. Your future employer wants to know that you’ll be able to meet deadlines, effectively use your workday to get tasks accomplished, and handle your workload without a lot of babysitting. Examples of specific time management responsibilities include goal setting, prioritizing tasks, meeting deadlines, and minimizing or eliminating distractions for optimal focus. Leadership: Showcasing how you’ve demonstrated leadership in your previous roles can demonstrate to your future potential employer what type of employee you are. Being an effective leader can increase your advancement opportunities within your organization. Use specific examples of successful leadership on your resume for the most significant impact.  So how do you showcase these skills on your resume? Now that you know what work skills for resumes employers want to see, you’re bound to have this question: Where do you put them? Keep in mind that the goal of your resume is to prove that you’re a qualified, no-brainer fit for the role you’re applying for. That’s why your smartest move is to tailor your resume to a specific job. Take a fine-tooth comb to the job description and identify words or skills that are repeated or emphasized. Those are traits that you should be incorporating in your own resume (provided you honestly possess them, of course). The most important skills should go as close to the top of your document as possible, because remember, hiring managers are only skimming for a few seconds. As for where you can work these skills in, you have a number of options, including:  Your professional summary at the top of your document A dedicated key skills section where you can bullet out your most relevant abilities Your past positions, where you can demonstrate how you applied your skills in previous jobs Finally, remember that many of your work skills and social work skills — from communication and time management to problem-solving and active listening — will be on display throughout the hiring process and your interviews.  So, it should go without saying, but show up on time, respond to messages promptly and respectfully, and treat everybody respectfully. After all, when it comes to your work skills, employers want you to show — and not just tell.

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Create a Strategic Business Plan: Operations & Execution

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Businesses may utilize operational plans to lay out objectives, set reasonable timelines, and define expectations. They can increase productivity and efficiency at work by studying how to write compelling and thorough operational plans. An operations plan specifying goals and objectives may be made using various techniques.

What is an Operational Business Plan?

An operational business plan is a detailed document that gives a window into the company's mission, vision, goals, and operational techniques that will steer it in the right direction. It is a pathway, a helpful instrument for the organization that gives answers on, for example, resource allocation, the running of operations, and efficiency measurement. 

An operational business plan is an indispensable tool for entrepreneurs to make the right decisions, create new opportunities, and ensure the business's sustainable long-term development goals. By establishing strategic directions, dealing with risks, procuring funding, and promoting accountability, businesses can overcome barriers and get the maximum benefit.

Why Do Businesses Need an Operational Business Plan?

A proper business plan is a must for any business, regardless of its size and industry, as it is like a roadmap to help reach success. It is common as it gives a clear vision and a specific direction, defining tactics, strategies, and objectives to achieve them. Companies must prioritize their chores and delegate resources adequately with a clear plan.

Let’s look at the reasons why an operational plan is a significant part of your business strategy: 

1. Providing Strategic Direction and Focus.

An operational business plan delivers strategic orientation and specialization by describing short-term and long-term goals. It lays out the boxes of reaching these objectives; this allows the companies to stay focused even when the market changes or the customers embrace different products.

2. Ensuring Risk Mitigation and Adaptability.

Companies can identify business threats and problems using inclusive market studies and competitors' analysis. An operational business plan provides a way to preemptively manage such risks and change strategies to take advantage of opportunities in a changing business environment.

3. Overcoming the Fear of Funding and Stakeholder Consent.

A properly drafted business plan is vital in getting investment funds from investors or lenders. You can use Google Workspace to draft a solid business plan streamlining operations. It shows you have researched the market, identified the business plan’s growth potential, and have a path to profit, thus inspiring confidence in stakeholders to provide you with the financial support needed for business initiatives.

4. Measuring Performance and Holding the Leadership Accountable.

An operational business plan is an important accountability tool, ensuring that the organization's goals and performance metrics are set. Teams can monitor growth, pinpoint mistakes, spot and reward accomplishments, build a culture of persistent improvement, and earn overall business influence. You must schedule appointments with your clients and discuss the minutes with the team to enhance the outcomes. 

Key Components of an Operational Business Plan

An operational business plan comprises several key components essential for guiding the organization toward its objectives: 

1. Executive Summary

The executive summary introduces the whole business plan and highlights its salient points, such as the company's mission, the aims, and the proposed strategies.

2. Business Description

This business plan component is highly focused and provides details, such as type of venture, products and services, market segment, competitive environment, and unique selling points.

3. Market Analysis

Market analysis is a comprehensive process involving the evaluation of industry trends, customer needs, competition, potential market openings, and information critical for making strategic decisions. Based on the market analysis, you need to create marketing strategies. There are various forms of marketing, including email marketing through email newsletters , social media marketing, and many other things.

4. Operational Strategies

Operational strategies essentially describe how the business plans to function effectively, utilizing methods such as production processes, supply chain management, quality control, and technology utilization.

5. Financial Projections

The financial projections involve expected revenues, expenses, cash flow statements, and breakeven analysis to evaluate the business's financial viability and long-term sustainability.

6. Implementation Plan:

The plan encompasses the project schedule, tasks, responsibilities, and milestones. It outlines the implementation of how the execution strategies were developed in the business plan and how the progress was effectively monitored.

7. Risk Management

Preparing for assessing possible risks and developing contingency plans to respond to them is what the business should do to protect itself against unpredictable obstacles or threats.

8. Monitoring and Evaluation

The setting of metrics and performance indicators facilitates performance monitoring and evaluation of the business progression towards its objectives in a continuous fashion, thus permitting the implementation of timely changes and upgrades when needed.

Crafting an Operational Business Plan

Crafting an operational business plan is critical to any business as this is the key to setting the business's targeted goals, strategies, and tactics. It defines the strategies and guidelines for success, thus ensuring productive use of available resources and effective decision-making.

1. Conducting Market Research for Your Operational Business Plan.

Market research is the most important part of creating an operational business plan . It means getting data on your intended audience, competitors' market trends, and the industry. This will assist you in defining your target market, familiarizing yourself with their needs and preferences, and analyzing the competition. After conducting thorough market research, you can decide on pricing, positioning, and marketing strategies. This is the right way to create opportunities for success.

2. Setting Realistic Goals and Objectives in Your Operational Business Plan.

To ensure the success of any work plan, it is essential to set clear and achievable aims and objectives. To do this, you must have a sense of direction and purpose. Goals should be defined in a way that makes them specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. When defining goals and objectives for your company, it's important to consider its core strengths and weaknesses, trends in the market, and industry standards. Setting attainable goals and objectives can motivate your team, keep track of progress, and make any necessary changes.

3. Building Plans and Techniques to Reach Your Objectives.

After you have identified your target and objectives, the next thing to do is develop the strategies and tactics to help you achieve these goals. Strategies are the broad approaches that tell you how you will attain your goals, while tactics are the specific actions or initiatives you will take to support those strategies. In strategy and tactics of development, consider your market segment, competitive advantages and resources, and market trends. By doing so, you can produce a comprehensive and well-thought-out action plan.

4. Creating an Organizational Structure and Assigning Responsibilities.

The operational business plan requires a well-defined organizational structure, and roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined. As a result of such an approach, people from all company positions unanimously know their role. While developing an organizational structure, establish the optimal size of the company, the complexity of the production, and the skills and needs of your employees. Closely define the reporting lines, generate communication channels, and share the responsibility to roll out smooth operations and make the staff accountable.

5. Financial Analysis and Budgeting in Your Operational Business Plan.

Financial analysis and budgeting are the key features of an operational plan of action. They guide you in your business's profitability and break-even point determination, investment allocation, and monitoring performance. Perform a financial statement analysis by investigating your earning streams, expenses, break-even points, and cash flow. Bring this information to learn how to create a realistic budget that matches your priorities and objectives. Make it a point to periodically assess and revise your financial projections to ensure that, from a financial standpoint, your business remains stable and on track.

6. Implementing and Monitoring Your Operational Business Plan.

To make your operational business plan successful, you need full communication, execution well, and continuous control. Communicate the plan to your team so everyone understands their roles and contributions. Create a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you track progress and monitor them regularly to ensure you hit your targets. Monitor market conditions, customer feedback, and performance metrics to identify problems and adjust appropriately. Consistently deliver information on the achieved milestones and result in positive outcomes.

7. Updating and Reviewing Your Operational Business Plan.

An operational business plan is a dynamic document that requires constant updating and review. When your business is going through changes and markets are expanding and contracting, it is wise to audit and update your plan. Make sure to carve out time to review the main plan at least once yearly, if needed. Assess your strategies and tactics to see if they need adjustment, update the financial projections, and implement any further revisions. By constantly revising and monitoring your operational business plan, you can make it widely applicable and efficient in achieving your business success.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Operational Business Planning

An operational business plan constitutes detailed work and an advanced strategic approach. Nevertheless, frequent mistakes often obstruct the implementation and may prevent the plan’s success.

Avoiding mistakes in operational business planning is worthwhile, as it can facilitate the development of more effective and sustainable strategies. Through creating specific goals, keeping risks low, designing realistic financial projections, planning the implementation, and monitoring progress, businesses can greatly increase their success potential and achieve their long-term objectives. Look for some key pitfalls to avoid when building a successful operational business plan.

1. Inadequate Definition of Goals.

If definite and attainable goals are specified, the organization will be in a state of haze and clarity. Establishing clear, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals is vital to staying focused on achieving the overall objectives of the business plan.

2. Inadequate Market Research.

Ignoring market research can lead to poor estimations about buyers’ expectations, market tendencies, and competitors’ strategies. Thorough market research is essential in an organization's branding since it gives the management the knowledge they need to make good decisions and develop good strategies.

3. Overlooking Risk Management.

Neglecting to recognize and address risks can leave the business vulnerable to unexpectedly challenging situations or disruptions. Integrating risk management strategies into the business plan mitigates risks and enhances resilience.

4. Unrealistic Financial Projections.

Financial mismanagement can occur from overly optimistic financial projections, damaging the business plan's credibility and implementation. Financial projections must rely on credible data, anticipated plausible outcomes, and lower probable estimations.

5. Planning Implementation.

A zero focus on the implementation plan indicates that execution will likely fail. A practical implementation strategy, including timelines, tasks, assignments, and resources, is necessary for the plan to be successful.

6. Lack of Monitoring and Failure to Respond Accordingly.

Failure to monitor progress and manage changes that arise after implementing the business plan will likely result in missed opportunities or inefficient strategies. The major performance indicators (KPIs) should be routinely monitored and evaluated to adjust and refine them for continuous betterment.

Wrapping Up,

To sum up, building a working operational business plan is an inseparable part of a successful business strategy. In doing so, you’ll have a detailed strategy that fits your expectations, explains your goals, and indicates direction for progress. It is essential to conduct thorough market research, have feasible goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics, build the organizational structure, analyze the financials, implement and control the plan, and constantly update and review it.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what is a business plan for the operations.

A business plan to implement operations includes the company's daily procedures and strategies to realize its strategic goals. It portrays how these operational areas, including production, marketing, finance, and human resource management, will support the business goals.

2. Why is a business operating plan important?

A complete business plan indicates who will do what and helps the company achieve its strategic goals. It strengthens efficiency, minimizes risks, and guides decision-making to ensure the strategy moves in the right direction.

3. What are the main parts of the operational guide?

The main components include mission, vision, operational strategies, organizational structure, resource allocation, performance metrics, risk management, and contingency alternatives.

4. What steps involve drawing up an operational business plan?

The business creates operational planning by

• Comparing current organizational status and goal setting as well as strategy development
• Resource allocation and implementation,
• Re-rolling to results and changing the environment.

5. How often should businesses revise and amend their operational plans?

The operational business plan should undergo a periodic review and revision, usually every quarter or annually, to keep it in line with the changes in market conditions, business priorities, and internal issues. Periodic reviews are imperative for keeping up-to-date with the dynamics and consistency in realizing business goals.

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Painless operational planning

Turning strategy into an operational plan isn't about doing more things right – it's about doing more of the right things. In contrast to strategic planning, the goal of an operational plan is to see how you'll execute on your strategy month by month, week by week. And since you work in a vacuum, this means you'll need to coordinate people, time, and budgets across teams (and maybe across departments, too).

An actionable operational plan answers questions like: 

• What milestones do we need to hit?
• Who will work on what?
• Where might we run into bottlenecks and how can we avoid them?
• How will we define success?
• What early indicators will tell us we're on the right track? 

Once you have an actionable plan drafted, be sure to gather and incorporate feedback from the core team involved, as well as stakeholders. Don't get discouraged if you go through a few iterations before landing on a plan everyone can get on board with. (They don't call operational planning a "process" for nothing!)

Ready to dig in? Let's do this. 

Top 6 plays for better operational planning

Whether you're planning for the quarter or for the fiscal year, operational planning is a team sport. This collection of plays is designed to help you collaborate and agree on goals, priorities, roles, and risks. 

Goals, Signals, and Measures

Starting with your high-level objective in mind, you'll define a specific goal. Then you'll brainstorm signals you can listen for in the short-term that'll let you know you're making progress (think KPIs) and agree on how you'll measure success. Run this play at the beginning of the planning process. 

Roles and Responsibilities

Gather your core team to establish who is responsible for what on a day-to-day basis. This play is very effective for uncovering skill gaps or redundancies. (Efficient resourcing for the win!)

Prioritization Matrix

Real talk: you can't just implement your operational plan. You'll also need to support requests coming in from across the organization. Run this play with leads from adjacent teams to determine the right balance. 

Capacity Planning

Resource management is tricky. Does your plan require more time than you have? Will the right people be available when you need them? Use this play to take the guesswork out of estimating and prioritizing. 

Dependency Mapping

Use our handy template to visualize the web of dependencies lurking within your plan and develop your approach to managing them. You'll think through the various systems your plan will affect, risks, and how to create a feedback loop with stakeholders.

Trade-off Sliders

Take the frustration out of decision-making by agreeing on what you need to optimize for at all costs, and where you can be flexible. This sets your team up to make every-day decisions autonomously and keep implementation chuggin' right along. 

also recommeded

Leadership team health monitor.

Delivering a great operational plan requires a healthy team of planners. Use the Health Monitor to self-assess against eight attributes common amongst high-performing teams, then track your progress over time. 

Gather your operational planning team for an honest discussion about how you're working together.

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Operational Planning: Types, Steps & Advantages Explained in 2024-25

Operational planning is a documented plan that outlines the goals and key objectives of an organization, and how they can be achieved. It ensures that team members understand their responsibilities as well as what they need to do.

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Table of Contents

Overview: operational planning in 2024-25.

A company needs a strategy plan, but that’s not enough. To ensure that your organization’s larger goals are achievable, you need an operational plan to manage the day-to-day tasks.

Operational plans do not have to be reserved for large companies. Individuals and small businesses can also benefit with operational planning.

This article will explain, what is operational planning is and how to make one without feeling overwhelmed.

What is an Operational Plan?

The operational plan guides and helps the teams to stay on the required project timeline and to make crucial decisions about the company’s long-term goals.

Who should develop an Operational Plan?

An operational plan is necessary to capture who is doing what and when. An operational plan should be smaller than your  strategic plan  in terms of scope and timeline. 

Instead of creating an operational plan for the entire company, you can create one for each department or team. You could create an operational plan for one initiative in a larger company. This is similar to a detailed plan.

To illustrate, you might create an operational plan that outlines the daily tasks your IT department must perform to support the company. 

The operational plan for your IT department might include details such as how often IT team members will check the IT request project inbox and budget details. It also may detail how IT team members will onboard new employees and how they will equip them.

An operational plan should be created at three levels:

• Scope:- Your operational plan will detail the who, what, and when for each activity. This plan should be focused on one team or initiative.
• Timeline:-  Depending on the speed of your organization’s movements, your operational plan should be spread over a quarter, six months, or a full fiscal year.
• The stakeholder:-  Make sure that the people involved with operational planning are near the work so they can accurately project the work and predict the work to be included in it.

Types of Operational Planning

There are basically two types of operational plans: Standing or single-use.

• A single-use plan  is operational planning that relates to one project. It is discarded after the project is completed. This is useful if the project doesn’t align with another project or won’t be used again in the future. It can be customized to suit each project.
• A standing program  is operational planning that’s repeated. This plan is used by a department for tasks or projects that arise frequently. These plans will save you the hassle of having to reinvent the wheel every time. However, you will lose some flexibility.

5 Steps For Operational Planning

You are not expected to create new plans or set new goals during the operational planning process. To create an operational plan, you should assess the work of your team and what you need to do daily or weekly to reach your strategic goals.  Here’s how:

1. Get started with a strategy plan

Create a strategic plan if you don’t have one. Before you can begin to break down the details, you need a long-term vision. A strategic plan can be created in four steps:

• Identify your position
• Develop your strategy
• Your strategic plan should be created
• Manage, share, and monitor your strategic plan

2. Reduce your scope

To create an operational plan that is detailed-oriented, it is important to limit the scope of your project to a specific team, department, or focus area. Your company’s size will determine the scope of your operational plans.

Imagine, for example , that you are breaking down your strategic plans into action plans for different company departments. 

Marketing teams can include design, product marketing, and social media. You should develop an operational plan for each of the smaller teams to capture daily functions.

3. Identify key stakeholders

Before you create an operational plan, determine who will be involved in it. The members of the team responsible for creating the operational plan should have a good understanding of the actions described in the plan.

Depending on the size of your team, the head of the design group and the team leaders should create the operational plan for the design team. After creating their operational plan, they should share it with the head of marketing to finalize approval.

Your operational plan describes the actions that your team will take to reach your goals within a given timeframe. 

You can outline an operational plan here:

• The goals of your team
• The deliverables will be realized by the operational plan
• Any desired outcome or quality standards
• Your operating budget, as well as your staffing and resource needs
• How to monitor progress and make reports

These are the questions to ask yourself if you have difficulty figuring out the details of your operational plan.

• What are we supposed to do? This information should be derived from your strategic plan or yearly goals.
• What are the daily tasks we must complete to reach our goals? These could be your daily tasks or new work you need to do.
• Who is responsible for these tasks? Each task should have a single owner to ensure that there is no confusion as to who to contact for updates or questions.
• What are the metrics that will help us achieve our goals? If you don’t have SMART, create it.

5. Update and share your operational plan

Once you have created your plan, share it with  key stakeholders  to make sure they know the team’s main goals and the daily tasks required to achieve them. You can manage your plan and update it on a shared platform that tracks real-time progress.

Things will change, just like any other element of project planning. You must monitor the progress of your operational plan, and provide updates to key stakeholders and team members about how you are tracking towards your goals. Written status updates provide a monthly progress report.

Advantages of Operational Planning

Clarifies your organizational goals

Managers and department heads can use an operational plan to define their daily tasks, activities, and responsibilities.

This also shows how each team member contributes to the overall goals of the company or department. Managers and employees cannot measure the success of their daily tasks against predetermined outcomes if they don’t have a plan.

Team productivity is increased

Businesses are always on the lookout for ways to improve productivity. This in turn leads to higher profits. An operational plan is one of the most influential and simple ways to increase efficiency.

Employees who know their daily responsibilities and objectives are more productive. If they aren’t clear on what is expected of them, their productivity could suffer.

This vital information is provided to employees across the company and in every department by an operational plan.

Boost your organization’s profitability

A plan can help keep teams and projects on track. Teams can increase their revenue and create new products when they are well managed. Innovation pays off. According to a BCG survey, 60% of innovation-focused companies report steady increases in revenues year after year. Teams can innovate faster and better when they have an operating plan.

Increases Competitive Advantage Components and multiple levels are combined to get competitive advantages.

Your workflows will run more smoothly if you coordinate the various parts using an operational plan. This will allow you to deliver high-quality deliverables on time, providing a great customer experience and helping you stay ahead of your competitors.

Operational Planning Disadvantages

Human error possible

Human error is a problem in manufacturing. It can happen when a product goes from production to sales.

Operations management teams must coordinate with cross-functional teams like finance, engineering, and Human Resources. Each team will be able to clearly understand the department’s end goals.

Interdependency amongst parts

Implementing an operations planning process can be a problem because it depends on the coordination between parts.

One component failing can cause a plan to fail, which can have a negative impact on the next. One process disruption can lead to a breakdown in the whole process and render the operational plan useless.

Operational planning vs. Strategic planning

Although they are related, these planning strategies have a different focus.

Operational planning refers to the daily work involved in executing your strategy. This ensures that you have the right resources and people to do your work efficiently.

Strategic planning, on the other hand, is about planning for the future and identifying the pipelines that will be needed.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor estimates that nearly 7 million Americans are self-employed, while another 10 million are employed by small businesses.

Chances are that your company has a form of strategic planning if you work for a large corporation. If you are one of the millions working remotely, however, success will depend on your operational planning.

An operational plan isn’t rocket science. But you have to do the work. An operational plan that is well-designed will include detailed information about manpower, resources, and the steps to be taken.

Although it may seem like a lot of work, the result will be worth it when your department completes a highly-rated project on schedule and within budget.

However, to get the help in managing/creating your operation plan, we are  ODINT Consultancy , here we are to help you out in each & every step of yours.

What are the three components of operations planning?

Once the company’s goal is established, the team will create a strategic plan that includes three components: sales, marketing, and operations.

What are the main components of an operation plan?

A solid plan is essential for any operation. There are five main components that you should focus on: Preparation (marketing), logistics, human resources (HR), financial limits, and preparation.

What are the differences between the two types?

The most common difference between the two types are ongoing and single-use plans

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Blog Business 10+ Operational Planning Examples to Fulfill your Strategic Goals

10+ Operational Planning Examples to Fulfill your Strategic Goals

Written by: Danesh Ramuthi Oct 25, 2023

An operational plan is a comprehensive, action-driven document that maps out how daily activities within an organization fuel the journey towards achieving strategic objectives.

Essentially acting as the nexus between high-level strategy and practical execution, this plan ensures that every department, from human resources to specific departments, operates in synchrony, aligning their day-to-day activities with the broader strategic goals.

By streamlining processes, it fosters cohesive efforts amongst diverse cross-functional teams, ensuring that both individual team members and entire departments work together harmoniously towards the company goals.

Ready to sculpt your organization’s future? Start your journey with venngage business plan maker and leverage their expertly crafted operational plan templates . 

Click to jump ahead: 

Why is an operational plan important?

10 operational plan examples, what should an operational plan include, how to write an operational plan.

• Strategic plan vs operational plan: What is the difference? 

In summary 

An operational plan is crucial because it serves as a bridge between a company’s high-level strategic planning and its day-to-day activities, ensuring that the business operations align with the strategic goals. 

While a strategic plan provides a long-term vision, outlining the company’s objectives and goals to gain competitive advantages in the business environment, the operational plan outlines the specific actions, key elements and resource allocation required to achieve those objectives. 

For example, while the strategic plan might set a goal for revenue growth over the fiscal year, the operational plan provides a detailed roadmap, breaking down major projects, assigning responsibilities to individual team members or specific departments and setting key performance indicators to monitor progress and ensure the entire organization works together effectively.

Operational planning, in essence, transforms the strategic objectives into actionable plans, ensuring that the entire team, from department heads to diverse cross-functional teams, is aligned and works in tandem to support revenue growth, increase productivity, and achieve the desired outcomes. 

Operational plans, through a well-structured operational planning process, also provide a clear understanding of the day-to-day activities, allowing team members to know their roles, leading to better collaboration and synergy. 

Moreover, by having clear operational plan examples or templates, businesses can ensure realistic expectations, manage their operating budget effectively and track progress through key performance metrics, thus ensuring that the company stays on course to realize its long-term vision.

Operational plans play a pivotal role in the business landscape, bridging the gap between strategic vision and tangible actions. They translate the overarching goals of an organization into detailed procedures, ensuring that daily operations are in line with the desired strategic outcomes. 

In the section below, I will explore a few operational plan examples, shedding light on their structure and importance.

Business operational plan example

A business operational plan is a comprehensive document that elucidates the specific day-to-day activities of a company. It presents a detailed overview of the company’s organizational structure, management team, products or services and the underlying marketing and sales strategies. 

For businesses, irrespective of their size, an operational plan can prove invaluable. By laying down the business goals and objectives, it acts as a blueprint, guiding entrepreneurs through the creation and implementation of strategies and action plans. The planning process also incorporates mechanisms to track progress and performance. 

Additionally, for startups or companies looking to scale, a meticulously crafted operational plan can be pivotal in securing funds from potential investors and lenders.

Layered on this are details about the company’s organizational structure, its products or services and its marketing and sales strategies. 

The document also delineates the roles and responsibilities of each team member, especially the management and key personnel. Given the dynamic nature of the business environment, it is imperative to revisit and update the operational plan regularly.

Related: 15+ Business Plan Templates for Strategic Planning

Simple operational plan example

A simple operational plan, often used by startups or smaller enterprises, emphasizes the basics, ensuring that the fundamental aspects of the business operations are captured succinctly. While it might not delve into the intricacies of every operation, it provides an overview of day-to-day activities, highlighting the goals and objectives the business aims to achieve in the short term.

In essence, this plan revolves around core elements like the company’s main objectives for the fiscal year, key responsibilities assigned to individual team members and basic resource allocation. A straightforward market analysis might also be included, offering insights into customer needs and competitive advantages the business hopes to leverage.

Though simple, this operational plan example remains pivotal for the organization. It provides a roadmap, guiding team members through their daily responsibilities while ensuring that everyone is working together towards shared goals. It becomes especially essential for diverse cross-functional teams, where clarity of roles can lead to increased productivity.

Modern operational plan example

In today’s fast-paced business environment, the emphasis on efficiency and innovative processes is paramount. The modern operational plan example caters precisely to this demand. Ideal for organizations aiming to streamline processes and highlight workflow, this type of operational plan emphasizes a more dynamic approach to planning. 

It not only reflects the evolving nature of business operations but also provides a modern backdrop for content, ensuring that the presentation resonates with the current trends and technological advancements. The use of modern tools and platforms within this plan enables diverse cross-functional teams to work together seamlessly, ensuring that day-to-day activities are synchronized with the company’s long-term vision.

Furthermore, such an operational plan helps the entire organization stay agile, adapting rapidly to changes in the business environment and ensuring alignment with strategic goals.

Minimalist operational plan example

The minimalist operational plan example champions simplicity and clarity. By focusing on clear and concise business strategies, it eliminates any potential ambiguity, ensuring that team members and stakeholders have an unclouded understanding of the company’s objectives and goals. 

The minimalist design not only promotes easy comprehension but also aligns with the modern trend of decluttering, ensuring that only the most vital components of the operational planning process are highlighted. 

This approach leaves no room for confusion, streamlining the planning process and making sure that individual team members and departments are aligned with the business’s key objectives. 

Moreover, the flexibility offered by a minimalist design allows businesses to craft an operational plan template that is not only functional but also accurately reflects their brand image and core values, ensuring cohesion across all aspects of the business strategy.

Clean operational plan example

The clean operational plan example stands as a testament to this principle. Ideal for businesses that prioritize clarity and directness, this format seeks to convey goals and strategies without overwhelming stakeholders. 

While maintaining a neat and organized layout, it ensures that tasks are managed effectively, helping team members grasp their roles and responsibilities without getting lost in excessive details.

One of the primary advantages of a clean operational plan is its ability to eliminate distractions and focus solely on the critical aspects of operational planning. 

Such a design aids in making sure that diverse cross-functional teams can work together harmoniously ensuring that day-to-day activities align seamlessly with the company’s long-term vision. 

The simplicity of the clean operational plan not only supports revenue growth by ensuring efficiency but also reinforces the company’s strategic goals, making it an excellent tool in the arsenal of businesses that believe in clear communication and precise execution.  

An effective operational plan acts as a roadmap, directing how resources should be allocated and tasks should be performed to meet the company’s objectives. Here’s what a comprehensive operational plan should encompass:

• Goals and objectives : Whether short-term or long-term, the operational plan should define clear goals and objectives that align with the company’s strategic plan. This gives direction to the entire organization, ensuring everyone is working towards a common aim.
• Clear responsibilities for team members : It’s essential that team members understand their roles within the operational plan. By outlining who is responsible for what, the plan ensures that there are no overlaps or gaps in duties and that everyone has clarity on their day-to-day activities.
• Assigned tasks: Alongside responsibilities, specific tasks need to be allocated to individual team members or specific departments. This granularity in assignment ensures that every aspect of the operational plan is covered.
• Timeline: This provides a clear schedule for when each task or objective should start and finish. A well-defined timeline assists in monitoring progress and ensures that the plan stays on track.
• Budget and resources : Every operational plan needs to factor in the budget and resources available. This includes everything from the operating budget to human resources, ensuring that the business has everything it needs to execute the plan effectively.

Read Also: 6 Steps to Create a Strategic HR Plan [With Templates]

As businesses evolve, it’s essential to have a comprehensive and adaptive operational plan in place to navigate the complexities of the business environment. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you craft an effective operational plan:

Step 1: Define your goals and objectives

Begin with a clear understanding of your strategic goals and objectives. This will act as a foundation for your operational plan. Ensure that these goals are in alignment with your company’s strategic plan and provide both short-term and long-term visions for the business.

Step 2: Determine roles and responsibilities

Identify the key stakeholders, department heads and team members who will play pivotal roles in executing the plan. Assign responsibilities to ensure that everyone knows their part in the planning process and day-to-day activities.

Step 3: Develop a timeline and milestones

Establish a clear timeline that breaks down the operational planning process. Include key milestones to track progress and ensure the plan remains on target.

Step 4: Allocate budget and resources

Determine the resources required to achieve your goals and objectives. This includes estimating the operating budget, identifying human resources needs and other resource allocations, ensuring you have everything in place to support revenue growth and other business needs.

Step 5: Outline day-to-day operations

Detail the day activities that are integral to the business operations. This will provide clarity on how different tasks and functions work together, ensuring efficiency across diverse cross-functional teams.

Step 6: Monitor and measure performance

Integrate key performance metrics and indicators to regularly monitor progress. Using both leading and lagging indicators will provide a comprehensive view of how well the operational plan is being executed and where improvements can be made.

Step 7: Review and adjust regularly

The business environment is dynamic and as such, your operational plan should be adaptable. Regularly review the plan, comparing actual outcomes with desired outcomes and adjust as necessary to account for changes in the business environment or company goals.

Step 8: Document and communicate

Create an operational plan document, potentially using operational plan examples or an operational plan template for guidance. Ensure that the entire team, from individual team members to the entire organization, is informed and aligned with the plan.

Related: 7 Best Business Plan Software for 2023

Strategic plan vs operational plan: What is the difference?

When running an organization, both strategic and operational planning play pivotal roles in ensuring success. However, each has a distinct purpose, time horizon and scope. Here’s a breakdown of the differences between these two essential business plans:

• Strategic plan : This plan sets the course for the organization’s future. It embodies the long-term vision and mission, detailing the objectives necessary to achieve it. The essence is how everyone, from C-suite executives to individual team members, collaborates towards realizing this vision.
• Operational plan : This is the roadmap for the day-to-day activities of the organization. While the strategic plan looks at the bigger picture, the operational plan hones in on the tactics and execution. It is crafted to support organizational goals with a focus on short-term activities specific to departments or functions.

Time horizon :

• Strategic plan : Long-term in nature, usually spanning three to five years.
• Operational plan : Concentrates on the short-term, with plans laid out yearly, quarterly, or even monthly.

Modification and updates :

• Strategic plan : This evolves over longer intervals, typically three to five years. There might be minor adjustments year over year based on changing business needs and the external business environment.
• Operational plan : Due to its short-term focus, it requires frequent assessments. Plans might be adjusted yearly, quarterly or even monthly to ensure alignment with the strategic objectives and current business environment.

Created by :

• Strategic plan : Crafted by the upper echelons of management – think CEO, CFO and other C-suite members.
• Operational plan : These plans come to life through mid-level management and department heads, ensuring alignment with the broader strategic vision while catering to specific departmental needs.
• Strategic plan : Broad in its outlook, it takes into account external factors like market trends, competition, customer needs and technological innovations.
• Operational plan : This narrows down the focus to the internal workings of the organization. It revolves around technology in use, key performance indicators, budgeting, projects, tasks and the allocation of responsibilities among team members.

As we’ve traversed through the importance of operational planning to various operational plan examples, it becomes evident that having a detailed and efficient operational plan is pivotal. 

From the business-centric to the minimalist approach, every operational plan serves as the backbone, guiding team members and ensuring that day-to-day activities align with the long-term vision and strategic goals.

By knowing what should be included in these plans and how to craft them, businesses can navigate the complexities of their operational environment with greater confidence.

For those looking to refine their planning process or start from scratch, the world of digital tools has made it significantly easier. Venngage offers business plan maker and operational plan templates designed to simplify the process. 

Whether you need to create an operational plan or draft a business strategy, their intuitive platform can guide you every step of the way.

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How to Write an Operations Plan Section of your Business Plan

Free Operations Plan Template

• June 26, 2024

An operational plan bridges the gap between high ambitions and actual achievements. This essential integral section helps businesses thrive, achieve their goals, and handle challenges with accuracy and purpose.

But is it challenging for you to write one in a manner that shows a clear picture of your business operations? Drafting the operations plan section can be tricky due to the uncertainties of the business environment and the risks associated with it.

Well, worry not you’re at the right place! Here, we will see how to write an engaging operational plan in a business plan with an example. So let’s get going.

What is an operations plan?

An operations plan of a business plan is an in-depth description of your daily business activities centered on achieving the goals and objectives described in the previous sections of the plan. It outlines various departments’ processes, activities, responsibilities, and execution time frame.

The operations section explains in detail the role of a team or department in the collective accomplishment of your goals. In other words, it’s a strategic allocation of physical, financial, and human resources toward reaching milestones within a specific timeframe.

Key questions your operational plan should address

A successful operational plan section of your business plan should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who is responsible for a specific task or department?
• What are the tasks that need to be completed?
• Where will these operations take place?
• When should the tasks be completed? What are the deadlines?
• How will the tasks be performed? Is there a standard procedure?
• How much is it going to cost to complete these tasks?

Let’s see how to write the operations section that answers all the above questions:

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How do you write an operations plan section?

Writing an operations plan within a business plan involves summarizing the day-to-day tasks necessary to run the business efficiently and meet its goals in both the development and manufacturing phases of the business.

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Development phase

In this stage, you mention what you’ve done to get your business operations up and running. Explain what you aim to change and improvise in the process. These are the elements your development section will contain:

Production workflow

Explain all the steps involved in creating your product. Provide a detailed description of each step, including any inefficiencies and the actions needed to address them. Here, you also mention any inefficiencies that exist and talk about the actions that need to be taken to tackle them.

Write down the risks involved in the production and potential problems you may face later down the line. State the safety measures employees take to avoid any misfortune while working. Explain how you store hazardous material and discard waste.

Mention any industry organizations and associations you’re a part of or plan to join. It’s essential to include this information to convey to the reader that you’re aware of the organizations and associations in your industry.

Supply chains

Here, you mention the vendors you work with to sell your products. Give a quick rundown of the agreements you signed with them. Mention the terms and conditions, prices, and timeframe of the contract. You can also mention if you have any backup suppliers if the existing ones fail to fulfill the requirements.

Quality control

Describe the measures you’re taking to assure and verify the quality of the end product. If you’re working towards getting a product certification, explain the steps you take to meet the set standards.

2. Manufacturing phase

The development stage acquaints the reader with the functioning of your business, while the manufacturing stage describes the day-to-day operation. This includes the following elements:

Outline of daily activities

Create an outline of the day-to-day activities of the production process. This includes the hours of operation, days the business will be open, and whether the business is seasonal or not.

Mention the location of your business , other branches you have, and their locations. If available, include images or drawings of the buildings, lease documents, real estate agreements, and other relevant documents. If you include these in your plan, mention why they’re crucial.

Tools and equipment

Describe the tools and machinery you use. You should also include the cost of the equipment; these will be important to predict financial requirements.

List down all your assets. These include land, buildings, tools, machinery, vehicles, and furniture. Include a legal description and the value of these assets.

Special requirements

If you require any additional facilities like water supply or power requirements, you mention them here. Specify what you need to do or have already done to acquire permissions for these requirements.

Raw materials

Mention your raw material suppliers. If you need any extra materials, you can also include them in your operations plan. Here, you also mention the contracts and agreements with your suppliers.

Productions

Explain the production process and the time required to produce one unit. Include the factors that may disrupt the production flow. Further, mention your strategies to tackle these inefficiencies to avoid delays in manufacturing.

Here, you state the process of storing manufactured products, managing the stock, and the costs of the storage spaces. Stringent management of inventory is essential to maintain product quality and assure customer satisfaction.

Feasibility

To ensure the viability and effectiveness of your product, detail any tests it has undergone. This includes prototype testing to evaluate the design and functionality.

Additionally, highlight product or service testing, such as performance, safety, and user experience assessments. These tests validate your product’s readiness for the market, ensuring it meets customers’ needs and regulatory standards.

Include the pricing strategy for your products or services. You can also include the final prices of your products.

Outline your pricing strategy including which approach you used, for example—cost-plus, value-based, or competitive pricing. Include the final prices of your products or services, providing a breakdown if there are different tiers or packages.

Why do you need an operations plan?

An operations plan is like an instruction manual for your business. It helps investors assess your credibility and understand the structure of your operations.

Internally, an operations plan works as a guide, which helps your employees and managers to know their responsibilities. It also helps them understand how to execute their tasks in the desired manner—all while keeping account of deadlines.

The operations plan helps identify and cut the variances between planned & actual performance and makes necessary changes.

It helps you visualize how your operations affect revenue and gives you an idea of when you need to implement new strategies to maximize profits. Some of the advantages of preparing an operations plan include:

Offers clarity

Operational planning makes sure that everyone in the audience and team is aware of the daily, weekly, and monthly work. It improves concentration and productivity.

Contains a roadmap

Operational planning makes it much easier to reach long-term objectives. When members have a clear business strategy to follow—productivity rises, and accountability is maintained.

Set a benchmark

It sets a clear goal for everyone about what is the destination of the company and how to reach it.

Manages resources

It supports you in allocating resources, such as human resources, equipment, and materials, ensuring that nothing is wasted and everything is used optimally.

Helps in decision making

An operations plan helps make smart decisions by showing how the business runs day-to-day. It provides details on resources, wise investments, and effective risk management, ensuring that decisions improve overall business operations.

Operations plan essentials

Now that you have understood the importance of the operations plan, let’s go through the essentials of an operations plan:

Strategic plan

Your operations plan is fundamentally a medium for implementing your strategic plan . Hence, it’s crucial to have a solid plan to write an effective operations plan.

Having clear goals is one of the most important things for an operations plan. For clear goals, you need to think SMART:

• Specific: Clearly define what employees should achieve
• Measurable: Quantify the goal to track progress
• Attainable: Set ambitious but achievable goals
• Timely: Provide a deadline

Different departments will have their objectives, all supporting the main goal. All these strategic objectives are flexible and should align with the company’s long-term goals.

Key performance indicators

It’s essential to choose the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It’s a good practice to involve all your teams while you decide your KPIs. Some of the important KPIs can be revenue growth, customer acquisition cost (CAC), net profit margin, churn rate, etc.

Creating a timeline with milestones is necessary for any business. It keeps everyone focused and helps track efficiency. If some milestones aren’t met in a certain period, then it’s time to re-evaluate them.

Examples of some milestones are:

• Hiring key team members in six months
• Setting checkpoints for different production phases like design, prototype, development, testing, etc.
• Acquiring the first 50 clients in a year

Now you’re all set to write an operations plan section for your business plan. To give you a headstart, we have created an operations plan example.

Operations Plan Example

We know this guide has been helpful for you in drafting a comprehensive operational plan section for your business plan.

If you’re still unsure or need help getting started, consider using business plan software like Upmetrics . It offers step-by-step guidance, so you won’t have to worry about what comes next.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a strategic plan and an operational plan.

A strategic plan outlines the long-term vision, mission, and goals of an organization, focusing on growth and direction over several years.

In contrast, an operational plan details the short-term tasks, processes, and resource allocation needed to achieve those strategic goals, emphasizing day-to-day efficiency and productivity.

What role does the operations plan play in securing funding for a business?

The operations plan defines the clear goals of your business and what actions will be taken daily to reach them. So, investors need to know where your business stands and it will prove the viability of the goals helping you in getting funded.

What are the factors affecting the operations plan?

Some of the factors that affect the operations plan are:

• The mission of the company
• Goals to be achieved
• Finance and resources your company will need

Can an operations plan be created for both start-up and established businesses?

Yes, both a startup and a small business need an operations plan to get a better idea of the roadmap they want for their business.

About the Author

Upmetrics Team

Upmetrics is the #1 business planning software that helps entrepreneurs and business owners create investment-ready business plans using AI. We regularly share business planning insights on our blog. Check out the Upmetrics blog for such interesting reads. Read more

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How to Write an Operational Plan for Your Business

In 2010, sean bandawat acquired jacob bromwell, a specialty housewares company that's been in existence since 1819. here, he shares his operational plan, focusing on his strategy to turn the company into a profitable business..

In most cases , entrepreneurs begin tackling the challenge of writing a business plan before the business exists. Doing that, of course, means that your plan will focus much more on the potential of the business and how you, as the entrepreneur, plan to take advantage of those opportunities. But, if you are writing a business plan for a 192-year-old business that you’ve just acquired, like Sean Bandawat did in 2010, with the intent to turn a money-losing operation into a cash cow, you’ll need to focus on an area neglected in many business plans produced by entrepreneurs: the Operating Plan.

The operating plan is the section of your business plan where you dig into more of the nuts and bolts of your business, areas like: production/manufacturing, inventory, and distribution. In other words, this is the time where you put aside the conceptual aspects of your business to get your hands dirty in terms of writing out the specific of how you’re going to make your product, store it, and then ship it out to your customers.

The topic you cover in your operational plan will vary based on the kind of business you run. For instance, if you are starting a retail business, you will want to think about things like inventory and distribution while a software company may be more focused on securing office space and computer equipment. Again, the point is that you need to think about the kinds of details you’ll be facing from the day you open the doors of your business.

Take it from Bandawat, who, as an undergraduate business student at the University of Southern California, crafted a business plan that involved turning around the operations of Jacob Bromwell , a specialty housewares company that has been continuously manufacturing authentic campfire, kitchen, and fireplace products for families since 1819. Bandawat, who comes from a family of successful entrepreneurs, teamed up with his longtime friend, Eric Stanton, to tap money from friends and family to buy Jacob Brownwell. But before they closed the deal in May 2010—just after Bandawat graduated—they wrote a business plan that won top undergraduate honors from the USC Marshall School of Business. 

The challenge for Bandawat and Stanton was that they wanted to continue to leverage the “Made in America” nature of their new company's products, which range from campfire popcorn poppers to chestnut roasters. That meant that, in crafting their operational plan, they needed to come up with specific strategies and actions they planned to take. “Taking over a business with 192 years of history presented very different challenges than creating a business from scratch,” says Bandawat. “So we relied on our advisory team to come up with a direction to take the company in.”

The key decision Bandawat and Stanton made in changing the operations of their business was to close the factory the company had been using in Michigan City, Indiana, and move the specialized equipment to a contract manufacturing facility in Glendale, California.

Bandawat and Stanton agreed to share their operational business plan with us as an example of how you, too, can come up with one for your business. You’ll see how they focused on concepts like operational efficiency, who their suppliers are, and how they planned to sell to new customers. “The key is to put something down and then start executing on it,” says Stanton. “And you’ll need to keep changing and updating it as you go and learn. You won’t know everything from the start.”

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How to write an operational plan for your business

Table of Contents

What is an operational plan? 

What should your business’s operational plan include , objectives , production , finances , simplify your operational finances and more with countingup.

If you plan to start a small business, you’ll need to prepare for success. A business plan will help you organise your services and structure to set up and earn funding. But an operational plan is essential to managing your day-to-day. 

This guide will cover how to write an operational plan for your business, including: 

• What is an operational plan?
• How can an operational plan help your business? 
• What should your operations plan include?

An operational plan outlines the physical requirements of running your business and how you’ll function daily. It can be its own document or a section of your business plan. Either way, the operational plan answers essential questions about how you’ll make your business earn a profit. 

This plan covers your business’s who, what, where, when, and how much, similar to a company description . But your operational plan dives into the nitty-gritty details and outlines exactly how you’ll achieve them. 

Writing an operational plan for your business will help you determine the essential materials to set up. The more detailed it is, the easier it will be to organise your business and increase productivity. As your operations grow, you can update the plan to fit your needs, so check in with it regularly. 

If you wonder how to write an operational plan for your business, you’ll need to know some key components. We’ll outline the essentials. 

The first step to outlining your operations is considering your objectives . Objectives are the specific things you want to achieve for your business in a particular time frame. For example, you may want to achieve profitability within the first six months. Or you might aim to use paid advertising to double your client base in a year. 

Create different objectives based on the departments or sectors of your business. For example, you can form financial, marketing, sales, and development objectives. To develop effective plans, use the SMART method, short for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. 

Next, you’ll have to consider the logistics of where you’ll run your business. Are your operations home-based or will you need an office or shop? If you need to find a space, outline where it will be and how you plan to do it. You may need to use a real estate or letting agency to purchase or let a space. 

So, discuss that process, when you plan to have a location, and how much you’ll spend. Costs will include things like rent, electricity, water, and any other elements you’ll need to include. For example, you might need to fit a cafe with kitchen equipment or decorate the space. 

If you already have an office or shop, provide the address. For a customer-facing shop or office, outline the working hours. 

Once you decide where you’ll run your business, you’ll need to consider the how. In this part, outline daily operating procedures. Which products or services will you provide? How will you offer them? Outline your structure and how you’ll achieve your objectives day-to-day.  

But your business procedures won’t be effective without a reliable production plan. If you need to develop a supply chain or keep an inventory , you’ll discuss that here. First, list which supplies, equipment, and technology you’ll need to run your business. Then, include which suppliers you’ll use to keep a stock of your products. 

Finally, detail what your production will cost by breaking it into sections. How much will you spend on your inventory each month as you start your business? What other regular expenses will you have?  

For example, if you run a coffee shop, you would outline which coffee supplier you’ll use and how much you’ll order at what cost. Then, you might include the cost of ordering baked goods for your shop and other things necessary for your business. Additional production costs might consist of shop rent, disposable cups, stirrers, milk etc. 

As you outline each aspect of your operations, consider the cost of running that aspect. Then, in the finances sections, bring each cost together. This section will help you get a broader picture of how much you’ll need to spend to run your business. 

This section also outlines where you’ll get the money to keep up these operations. Similarly, list prices for your products or services, plus the profit margin and sales goals. Then, touch on how you’ll accept payments and organise your finances. 

You might discuss what business current account you’ll use and how you’ll maintain your financial accounting . For example, you could explain how you’ll use Countingup , the business current account with built-in accounting software. 

The Countingup app offers valuable features that simplify your finances, automate processes, and help track your performance. Using a unique tool like this will make your operations more efficient and allow you to maintain accurate records. 

When writing your operational plan, it’s also important to consider your timeline. Consider outlining a daily working schedule and attaching times to different functional tasks. For example, how often will you reorder inventory? When do you plan to achieve your short-term, medium-term, and long-term objectives?

By organising your calendar, you can stay on top of what you need to do and when you need to do it. Plus, consider how you’ll manage your time well , which will help you run your business smoothly.  

Once you know how to write an operational plan for your business, you can earn money. But, financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you run a business. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup offers features that help you stay on top of your operations. With automatic expense categorisation and receipt capture, you can stay on top of your business spending and maintain accurate records. Plus, the app lets you create and send invoices on the go, helping you receive the money you earn. The app will even notify you when the invoices are received and match them to payments. 

Start your three-month free trial today. 

Find out more here .

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How To Write the Operations Plan Section of the Business Plan

Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.

Stage of Development Section

Production process section, the bottom line, frequently asked questions (faqs).

The operations plan is the section of your business plan that gives an overview of your workflow, supply chains, and similar aspects of your business. Any key details of how your business physically produces goods or services will be included in this section.

You need an operations plan to help others understand how you'll deliver on your promise to turn a profit. Keep reading to learn what to include in your operations plan.

Key Takeaways

• The operations plan section should include general operational details that help investors understand the physical details of your vision.
• Details in the operations plan include information about any physical plants, equipment, assets, and more.
• The operations plan can also serve as a checklist for startups; it includes a list of everything that must be done to start turning a profit.

In your business plan , the operations plan section describes the physical necessities of your business's operation, such as your physical location, facilities, and equipment. Depending on what kind of business you'll be operating, it may also include information about inventory requirements, suppliers, and a description of the manufacturing process.

Keeping focused on the bottom line will help you organize this part of the business plan.

Think of the operating plan as an outline of the capital and expense requirements your business will need to operate from day to day.

You need to do two things for the reader of your business plan in the operations section: show what you've done so far to get your business off the ground and demonstrate that you understand the manufacturing or delivery process of producing your product or service.

When you're writing this section of the operations plan, start by explaining what you've done to date to get the business operational, then follow up with an explanation of what still needs to be done. The following should be included:

Production Workflow

A high-level, step-by-step description of how your product or service will be made, identifying the problems that may occur in the production process. Follow this with a subsection titled "Risks," which outlines the potential problems that may interfere with the production process and what you're going to do to negate these risks. If any part of the production process can expose employees to hazards, describe how employees will be trained in dealing with safety issues. If hazardous materials will be used, describe how these will be safely stored, handled, and disposed.

Industry Association Memberships

Show your awareness of your industry's local, regional, or national standards and regulations by telling which industry organizations you are already a member of and which ones you plan to join. This is also an opportunity to outline what steps you've taken to comply with the laws and regulations that apply to your industry. 

Supply Chains

An explanation of who your suppliers are and their prices, terms, and conditions. Describe what alternative arrangements you have made or will make if these suppliers let you down.

Quality Control

An explanation of the quality control measures that you've set up or are going to establish. For example, if you intend to pursue some form of quality control certification such as ISO 9000, describe how you will accomplish this.

While you can think of the stage of the development part of the operations plan as an overview, the production process section lays out the details of your business's day-to-day operations. Remember, your goal for writing this business plan section is to demonstrate your understanding of your product or service's manufacturing or delivery process.

When writing this section, you can use the headings below as subheadings and then provide the details in paragraph format. Leave out any topic that does not apply to your particular business.

Do an outline of your business's day-to-day operations, including your hours of operation and the days the business will be open. If the business is seasonal, be sure to say so.

The Physical Plant

Describe the type, site, and location of premises for your business. If applicable, include drawings of the building, copies of lease agreements, and recent real estate appraisals. You need to show how much the land or buildings required for your business operations are worth and tell why they're important to your proposed business.

The same goes for equipment. Besides describing the equipment necessary and how much of it you need, you also need to include its worth and cost and explain any financing arrangements.

Make a list of your assets , such as land, buildings, inventory, furniture, equipment, and vehicles. Include legal descriptions and the worth of each asset.

Special Requirements

If your business has any special requirements, such as water or power needs, ventilation, drainage, etc., provide the details in your operating plan, as well as what you've done to secure the necessary permissions.

State where you're going to get the materials you need to produce your product or service and explain what terms you've negotiated with suppliers.

Explain how long it takes to produce a unit and when you'll be able to start producing your product or service. Include factors that may affect the time frame of production and describe how you'll deal with potential challenges such as rush orders.

Explain how you'll keep  track of inventory .

Feasibility

Describe any product testing, price testing, or prototype testing that you've done on your product or service.

Give details of product cost estimates.

Once you've worked through this business plan section, you'll not only have a detailed operations plan to show your readers, but you'll also have a convenient list of what needs to be done next to make your business a reality. Writing this document gives you a chance to crystalize your business ideas into a clear checklist that you can reference. As you check items off the list, use it to explain your vision to investors, partners, and others within your organization.

What is an operations plan?

An operations plan is one section of a company's business plan. This section conveys the physical requirements for your business's operations, including supply chains, workflow , and quality control processes.

What is the main difference between the operations plan and the financial plan?

The operations plan and financial plan tackle similar issues, in that they seek to explain how the business will turn a profit. The operations plan approaches this issue from a physical perspective, such as property, routes, and locations. The financial plan explains how revenue and expenses will ultimately lead to the business's success.

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Expertly Writing the Operations Plan Section of Your Business Plan

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Operational plans are important for any effective business plan . They provide a roadmap for how the company will operate on a day-to-day basis. The operational strategic plan should outline the company’s goals and objectives, as well as the strategies and actions that will be taken to achieve them.

Business Operations Section of a Business Plan

The operational plan or operations section of a business plan is where you describe how your business will function on a day-to-day basis. This includes everything from the resources you’ll need to run your business, to the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks, to the processes and procedures you’ll use to get work done.

Purpose of the Operational Plan Section of a Business Plan

An operational plan is essential for any business because it provides a roadmap for how it will function. It ensures that everyone involved in the business is on the same page and knows what their roles and responsibilities are. Having an operational plan also makes it easier to track and accomplish goals, while driving cost reduction and improving overall results. Finally, your operations plan section helps show readers that you can turn your vision and goals into reality.

Benefits of an Operations Plan Include:

• Identifying the key processes your company must perform to achieve its goals
• Mapping out short-term and long-term milestones so you have specific goals and a roadmap for achieving them
• Understanding the human and other resources required to execute your vision

Writing an Operations Section of a Business Plan

When writing the operations section of a business plan, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. First, be sure to describe the resources that will be required to run your business. This includes everything from office space and equipment to human resources. Next, detail the processes and procedures that will be used to get work done. Be as specific as possible so that there is no confusion about how things should be done. Finally, identify the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks. This includes both employees and contractors.

Tracking Key Performance Indicators with Operational Planning

As a business owner, it’s important to track your progress against your company goals. This is where KPIs come in. KPIs are performance indicators and an important part of creating a strategic plan that can help you track your progress and identify areas of improvement. You should document your KPIs in the operation plan of your business plan

There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing KPIs for your business:

• Make sure that the KPIs you choose are relevant to your company’s goals.
• Choose KPIs that can be easily measured.
• Avoid choosing too many KPIs, as this can be overwhelming. Stick to a few key ones that will give you the most insights into your business’s progress.
• Set realistic targets for each KPI. This will help you track your progress and identify areas of improvement.
• Review your KPIs on a regular basis to ensure that they are still relevant and accurate, while also being in line with strategic plans.

Some Examples of KPIs that You Could Track with an Operational Plan

When creating an operations plan, it’s important to track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your progress against your company goals. Some examples of KPIs that you could track are:

• Sales growth
• Delivery times
• Customer satisfaction ratings
• Product Quality
• Production Process
• Employee retention
• Operational costs

Creating an operational plan with KPIs will help you track your progress, identify areas of improvement, improve strategic planning and make necessary changes to reach your company’s strategic objective.

Example of an Operations Section of a Business Plan

Here is what an operations plan example might look like:

The XYZ Company will require the following resources to operate:

• 1,000 square feet of office space
• $10,000 for office furniture and equipment
• 3 full-time employees
• 2 part-time employees
• 1 contractor

The XYZ Company will use the following processes and procedures to get work done:

• All new clients will be contacted within 24 hours of the initial inquiry
• Initial consultations will be scheduled within 48 hours of contact
• Proposals will be presented within 10 days of the initial consultation
• Work will begin within 2 weeks of proposal acceptance

The following people will be responsible for carrying out these tasks:

• John Smith, full-time employee, will contact new clients
• Jane Doe, full-time employee, will schedule initial consultations
• John Smith and Jane Doe will conduct initial consultations
• John Smith and Jane Doe will prepare proposals
• John Smith and Jane Doe will manage projects
• Joe Johnson, contractor, will provide support as needed

An operations plan is a critical part of any business planning work. It provides a roadmap for how the business will function on a day-to-day basis. This includes everything from the resources you’ll need to run your business, to the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks, to the processes and procedures you’ll use to get work done. Having operational plans in place will ensure that everyone involved in the business is on the same page and knows what their roles and responsibilities are. It will also make it easier to track and accomplish goals.

Key Takeaways

A few key things to remember when writing your operations plan:

• Describe the resources that will be required to run your business
• Detail the processes and procedures that will be used to get work done
• Identify the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks

Following these tips will help you create a comprehensive and effective operations plan for your business.

A strategic plan is one of the critical components of any successful company. The operations plan outlines the roadmap for your business, outlining the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. If you’re not sure where to start, we can help. Our team of experts has created a comprehensive business plan template that will guide you through the process of creating an operational plan tailored to your specific business needs. Ready to get started? Download our template today and get access to all the tools and information you need to create a thriving business.

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Operational Planning: Meaning, Examples And Benefits

Adil holds a managerial position at an organization that manufactures railway wagons and is looking to increase production and revenue…

Adil holds a managerial position at an organization that manufactures railway wagons and is looking to increase production and revenue by 50% over the next five years. Adil and his team are tasked with creating a plan that includes marketing, sales and operations goals. He understands that the operations section of the plan will involve several components, including manufacturing, procurement, warehousing and transportation.

Adil has a clear strategy for the operational planning segment. He entrusts Shalini with opening up two more production lines at the company’s Chennai facility to increase production. He puts Harsh on building a new factory at Ranipet, Tamil Nadu, with a total capacity of making 50 passenger cars every month to support production increases over the next five years. Saba is given the responsibility of diversifying the supply chain to ensure all materials are procured from no less than three vendors. Roshan is tasked with increasing warehouse space to accommodate supplies and product output from the new production lines. Finally, Heena is entrusted with expanding transportation partnerships to fulfill the goal of increasing shipping volumes.

Owing to Adil’s meticulous operational planning and his team’s efficient execution, the firm is able to increase its production and revenue according to its goals significantly.

What Is Operational Planning?

Examples of operational planning in management, benefits of operational planning.

Before we delve any deeper into the subject, it’s important to understand the meaning of operational planning and what it involves.  Operational planning is a method a department or team uses to take the company’s strategic plan and turn it into a detailed map broken up into various components. This map, called the operational plan, documents the team’s exact steps within specified time periods to reach each goal. Such a plan is made with a focus on the future to outline budget allocations, departmental activities and targets for the next year to three years. The operational planning meaning becomes clearer when we understand that the operations segment is but one component of a larger strategic plan. Adil was well aware of this as he has years’ worth of experience in operational planning in management .

In operational planning , it’s essential to record each team member’s responsibilities for the fiscal year in detail. How detailed the plan is will depend upon the projected timeline for goal completion and how fast the team works. For businesses that need to hit their targets quickly, the plan should be designed for a six-month timeline. For long-term goals, operational planning should be done for the whole fiscal year.

Now that we’ve covered the meaning of operational planning , let’s look at some examples of operational planning in management and what they entail.

Organizations can’t function without operations. Let’s explore some examples of operational planning which many companies are incorporating into their business models.

Production Planning

This type of operational planning in management is geared towards mapping a business’s output. Here the focus is primarily on using labor and capital intelligently to make products that can be sold profitably. Take, for instance, a frozen yogurt manufacturer that creates 10 different flavors within just one facility. Operational planning here will involve organizing supplies and streamlining production lines, work shifts and warehouse space to maintain manageable overhead costs.

Capability Planning

Operational planning is required to identify the purpose of a business and then create a roadmap for building on its capabilities. For example, a private taxi company evaluating its own business capabilities will devise a plan to maintain its fleet better and upgrade operations to enhance the safety of women passengers.

Sales Planning

Operational planning is crucial for matching sales targets with production capabilities. For instance, if a makeup brand wants to run a promotional campaign that could grow sales by 150%, only tight operational planning will be able to determine whether the company’s factories can boost production to such a degree.

Going over a few key examples of operational planning in management would be helpful to examine how the process actually helps. Let’s look at a few benefits of operational planning .

Without operational planning in management , businesses would run inefficiently and incur losses. Planned operations are a company’s lifeblood. Here are some key benefits of operational planning .

Provides Clarity

Among other things, operational planning ensures everyone on the team has a clear idea about the work to be done on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis. This helps maintain focus and increase efficiency.

Provides A Roadmap

Achieving long-term goals becomes much easier with operational planning . Productivity increases when team members have a detailed plan to follow; this also helps maintain accountability.

Reduces Delay

With a clearly charted-out path, employees know how much ground they have to cover by the end of each day. This helps them manage their time better and stay on schedule, thereby producing quality and timely work.

Good operational planning benefits organizations greatly. Harappa’s Rise In An Organization program is designed to help ambitious professionals become ace planners of operations. Under the guidance of a stellar faculty that takes you through 17 in-depth lessons, you’ll learn to inspire trust, lead with influence and become a reliable team player who gets things done. With the help of frameworks such as The Trust Equation and The Flywheel Effect, you’ll develop skills that equip you to manage projects expertly, adapt to situations instinctively and foster trust.

The Rise In An Organization pathway is the ticket to masterfully influencing decisions and outcomes and facing challenges head-on!

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With today's rapid technological advancements, organizations must reinvent how they operate and do business. the ey–o9 solutions alliance helps next-generation global enterprises in adopting integrated business planning solutions and modernizing their core supply chain, commercial and profit and loss functions., the alliance combines o9 solutions' ai- and ml-supported planning, analytics and data platform, known as the digital brain, with the deep supply chain knowledge, system integration and data science capabilities of ey us. the o9 solutions’ enterprise software platform unifies business processes, transforming traditionally slow and siloed planning functions into integrated and “intelligent” planning., together, ey us and o9 solutions support clients with system integration, sprint execution, program management, governance and change management. through this alliance, ey us and o9 solutions will help clients detect early risks across the supply chain and make intelligent business decisions., rajesh rao, ey–o9 solutions alliance leader, ernst & young llp, says:, “we are thrilled to be cultivating this relationship with o9 solutions, which will help us to transform our supply chain client engagements. this alliance provides a fit-for-purpose, configurable technology platform designed for quick deployment and agile implementation via the cloud. with this alliance, clients can have faster, more intelligent planning and business decision-making to help improve business outcomes.”, tanguy caillet, executive vice president, growth markets and global alliances, o9 solutions, says:, “we’re pleased to build a collaborative relationship with ey us, a trusted collaborator for businesses worldwide, to transform and digitalize the planning organizations and decision-making processes of our respective customers using the o9 digital brain platform. we look forward to providing, with ey us, robust business planning transformation that helps organizations gain the business insights and decision-making tools necessary to move their business forward.”, for more information, visit  ey.com/alliances., ey exists to build a better working world, helping to create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets., enabled by data and technology, diverse ey teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate., working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, ey teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today., ey refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of ernst & young global limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. ernst & young global limited, a uk company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. information about how ey collects and uses personal data and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. ey member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. for more information about our organization, please visit ey.com., this news release has been issued by eygm limited, a member of the global ey organization that also does not provide any services to clients., related news.

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Nationwide plans 5% staff reduction in its insurance business over the next year

Nationwide said Friday that it plans to reduce its headcount by about 5% over the next year.

The insurer and financial services company said the cuts will come from its property and casualty operations and its technology teams. There will be no cuts in the company's financial services operations. Nationwide said it hopes the cuts can come with minimal layoffs.

"Over the next year we anticipate (property and casualty) and some of its supporting functions including technology, will collectively operate with fewer positions," Nationwide said in a statement. "This is due to a variety of factors including associates voluntarily moving to other roles within and outside Nationwide, not filling open roles when possible, slowing business in underperforming lines, and operating model changes."

Nationwide said the reductions were necessary because of "evolving business needs."

"As markets change and the company continues our modernization journey, we are positioning our property and casualty and supporting technology teams to serve our members and agents for years to come. These periodic business strategy updates typically include shifts in staffing — with some areas increasing and others decreasing —based on evolving business needs."

Exactly how many jobs will be affected and where they're located is difficult to say right now, the company said Friday.

Nationwide employs about 24,000 workers, including about 11,000 in Ohio, so 5% of all would be about 1,200 jobs.

"We can’t speculate on the total number of job impacts," the company said. "Eligible associates are able to apply for  hundreds of open roleswe have across the country."

Nationwide is counting on attrition and not filling open roles to reduce the need for layoffs.

"Staff reductions are always a last resort, and we will support associates throughout their career transition," the company said. "All impacted, eligible associates will be provided 60-day formal notice, a severance package and outplacement services. We are committed to moving through this period with great respect and full support for those impacted."

More: A new way to work: Nationwide redesigns, consolidates office space in a work-from-home era

Nationwide's announcement comes as insurers, particularly in the property and casualty business, across the country have been cutting jobs.

That sector shed at least 6,800 jobs in 2023, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence . About 20 carriers cut jobs last year.

Liberty Mutual and Grange cut jobs in Columbus last year.

The cuts have come as drivers and homeowners have had to pay for soaring inflation for the cost of coverage that insurers have blamed on distracted driving and the cost of fixing more expensive cars. The cost of insuring a car has jumped 19.5% in the past year, more than any other category, according to federal inflation data.

Like other insurers, Nationwide also has been hit with steep claims costs from natural disasters that has led the insurer to retreat from some parts of the country.

Nationwide also has been hitting pet owners with stiff increases in rates and is dropping coverage for about 100,000 pets across the country, blaming the rising costs of veterinary care and other factors that it says are threatening long-term viability and profitability of its pet insurance business.

Even with that, Nationwide reported record revenue in 2023 of $60.3 billion.

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GE HealthCare and AWS Announce Strategic Collaboration to Accelerate Healthcare Transformation with Generative AI

• GE HealthCare selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider to deliver entirely new, purpose-built foundation models designed to fast-track the development of innovative healthcare applications
• GE HealthCare plans to train and deploy clinical foundation models on AWS’s machine learning and generative AI technologies to help healthcare providers expedite clinical and operational workflows to improve delivery of care

Chicago — July 25, 2024 — GE HealthCare (Nasdaq: GEHC) and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (Nasdaq: AMZN), today announced a strategic collaboration to develop purpose-built foundation models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications designed to help clinicians improve medical diagnostics and patient care. GE HealthCare has selected AWS as its strategic cloud provider and plans to use its healthcare and generative AI services to build and implement new, versatile foundation models to transform the future of healthcare. These new generative AI-powered workflows are intended to fast-track the delivery of innovations to streamline healthcare operations, increase diagnostic and screening accuracy, enhance outcomes, lower access hurdles, and promote equitable care, thereby easing provider workload and accelerating industry innovation.

"GE HealthCare has been pioneering medical technology for more than a century. With more than one billion patients around the world touched by our products, we play an important part in improving the quality of care and have a responsibility to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to enable precision care,” said Peter Arduini, President and CEO, GE HealthCare. “This new collaboration with AWS allows us to build on our legacy of innovation by embracing the power of AI to expedite the creation of medical technologies that we expect will redefine clinical workflows and the delivery of care.”

GE HealthCare intends to utilize Amazon Bedrock , a fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry's leading foundation models, to create and deploy bespoke generative AI applications, amplifying the advantages of generative AI for their customers. Leveraging Bedrock’s enterprise-grade security and privacy along with a broad selection of industry-leading foundation models, GE HealthCare plans to build and scale its own proprietary generative AI applications for healthcare use cases with an aim to enhance efficiency, care delivery, and the patient experience.

“With AWS, GE HealthCare plans to use the cloud to deliver more personalized, intelligent, and efficient care,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. “GE HealthCare is putting generative AI at the heart of their innovation, accelerated by the investments we have made in healthcare-specific cloud services and generative AI capabilities that provide best-in-class security, data privacy, and access to the latest state-of-the-art foundation models. With AWS as their strategic cloud provider, GE HealthCare can build transformative clinical foundation models and applications for the healthcare industry."

GE HealthCare’s internal developers are planning to use Amazon Q Developer, a generative AI–powered assistant to accelerate software development by generating real-time code suggestions, securely completing tasks, and more. The company also expects to use Amazon Q Business to explore the intersection of multi-modal clinical and operational data with an aim of reducing the cognitive burden on physicians, enabling personalized care, and increasing efficiency. Leveraging AWS's generative AI technology, GE HealthCare expects to reduce clinical application development cycles from years to months and to accelerate the delivery of new healthcare solutions.

"By combining generative AI with our deep expertise, we're igniting a new era in healthcare,” said. Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, Global Chief Science and Technology Officer at GE HealthCare. “Our work with AWS is a big step towards helping clinicians make medical care simpler, more efficient, and deeply personalized. It's about advancing the way we care for people everywhere, one innovative solution at a time.”

Additionally, GE HealthCare plans to modernize its suite of applications with its own foundation models developed on Amazon SageMaker , a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. By developing its own foundation models specialized for medical use cases, GE HealthCare intends to accelerate the development and deployment of web-based medical imaging applications and integrating these foundation models to drive efficiency, interoperability, and improve user experiences across the company’s equipment and software solutions. Customers could use GE HealthCare's generative AI-powered applications, that will integrate with AWS HealthLake and AWS HealthImaging , to quickly and securely analyze various types of patient data, leading to improved clinical efficiency and better patient care.

"We are optimistic about the ways in which generative AI will be able to transform healthcare for the better, and we look forward to seeing the new tools and applications that result from collaborations across industry and health care," said Dr. Keith Dreyer, Chief Data Science Officer, Mass General Brigham and leader of the Mass General Brigham AI business. "As healthcare systems like Mass General Brigham lean into AI to accelerate their work, we see great potential for new foundation models that utilize advanced technologies."

The healthcare sector is responsible for about 30% 1 of the world's data generation, however, 97% 2 of this data goes largely untapped due to its unstructured nature. This collaboration will focus on the development of multi-modal foundation models designed to analyze a vast array of unstructured medical data (e.g., records, reports, and images) and provide precise, adaptable insights for a multitude of healthcare applications. Unlike traditional ML, these models can be built to interpret data across various diseases and tasks simultaneously.

GE HealthCare has been investing in AI for years. For the third year in a row, GE HealthCare topped a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) list of AI-enabled device authorizations, with 72. 3 Its recent foundation model work includes a project focused on an advanced ultrasound image segmentation tool . Utilizing foundation model technology, this research tool has demonstrated great proficiency in isolating and identifying anatomical structures with over 90% accuracy, requiring little human input. 4 Its key feature is its generalization capability, which can segment anatomical structures, including fetal heads and breast lesions, which were not part of the foundation model’s initial training set. This advanced feature demonstrates the model’s ability to be applied to uses cases beyond what it was originally trained for.

To learn more about GE HealthCare’s digital solutions and healthcare transformation, visit here .

1 RBC: https://www.rbccm.com/en/gib/healthcare/episode/the_healthcare_data_explosion 2 Deloitte 2023. A holistic approach to unlock the value of health data. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/be/Documents/life-sciences-health-care/Health%20Data.pdf 3 FDA: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-aiml-enabled-medical-devices 4 Technology in development that represents ongoing research and development efforts. These technologies are not products and may never become products. Not for sale. Not cleared or approved by the U.S. FDA or any other global regulator for commercial availability.

About GE HealthCare Technologies Inc.

GE HealthCare is a leading global medical technology, pharmaceutical diagnostics, and digital solutions innovator, dedicated to providing integrated solutions, services, and data analytics to make hospitals more efficient, clinicians more effective, therapies more precise, and patients healthier and happier. Serving patients and providers for more than 125 years, GE HealthCare is advancing personalized, connected, and compassionate care, while simplifying the patient’s journey across the care pathway. Together our Imaging, Ultrasound, Patient Care Solutions, and Pharmaceutical Diagnostics businesses help improve patient care from diagnosis, to therapy, to monitoring. We are a $19.6 billion business with approximately 51,000 colleagues working to create a world where healthcare has no limits.

Follow us on LinkedIn , X (formerly Twitter) ,  and Insights for the latest news, or visit our website https://www.gehealthcare.com/ for more information.

More From Forbes

5 chatgpt prompts to build unstoppable momentum (stay on track).

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5 ChatGPT prompts to build unstoppable momentum (stay on track)

Momentum means marching towards your business goals with high energy and a big sense of purpose. You know when you have it. But if you’re stuck in the details of your business, you might find it hard to zoom out, figure out where to focus, and find the sources of momentum that are definitely there. Don’t get consumed by busywork. There is another way.

Use these left-field ChatGPT prompts to find momentum, keep your focus sharp, and keep your business moving forward, even through challenges. Copy, paste and edit the square brackets in ChatGPT, and keep the same chat window open so the context carries through.

Supercharge your business: 5 ChatGPT prompts for big business momentum

Define your north star metric.

What’s the one big reason you do what you do? Why do you jump out of bed when you could lie in? Momentum requires direction. Every business needs a north star. Find yours. Define that single metric that best captures your business's success and use it as your guiding light. When you know what truly matters, every decision becomes clear.

"My business is in the [your industry] sector, focusing on [your main product/service]. Help me identify the most impactful 'north star' metric for my business. Suggest 5 potential metrics, explaining how each one reflects our overall success and growth. For each metric, provide examples of how tracking it could influence daily decisions and long-term strategy. After presenting the options, ask which metric resonates most with my business goals and why."

NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Thursday, August 1st

Elon musk’s experimental school in texas is now looking for students, on the ground in gaza: the reality of israel’s military operations, create your momentum flywheel.

Success breeds success. When you’re onto something good, new doors will open, ten new customers lead to thirty, and amazing opportunities appear from nowhere. Speed this process up by creating your momentum flywheel. Identify and amplify the virtuous cycles, and figure out what you do that scales beyond your time. Build a flywheel that turns small wins into massive momentum.

"Based on my business model in [your industry], help me design a momentum flywheel. Identify 5 key components of my business that, when improved, positively impact each other in a cycle. For each component, suggest specific actions that could kickstart the flywheel effect. Illustrate how improving one area can lead to cascading benefits across the entire business.”

If you have premium chatGPT, add this: “Provide a visual representation of this flywheel and explain how I can use it to guide my strategic decisions."

Become the business whisperer

Business doesn’t feel like hard work if you have momentum. If you’re moaning and groaning through every day, consider you could be doing it wrong. Try this. Instead of pushing your business forward with energy and effort, learn to listen to its subtle cues. Develop an almost supernatural ability to sense your company's needs. Your customers are telling you what they want. Your team is too. What would happen if you actually listened?

"Imagine I have the ability to 'hear' my business's innermost workings, like a horse whisperer for companies. Help me develop this sixth sense for my business in [your industry]. Suggest 5 unconventional ways to tune into the subtle signals of my company's health, growth potential, and hidden obstacles. These methods should go beyond traditional metrics and tap into the 'energy' of the business. For each approach, explain how it could provide unique insights and guide intuitive decision-making."

Hack your business's evolutionary path

Nature knows best, and it has laws. Specific cycles, concepts and natural phenomena. Use this prompt to apply these laws of nature to your business to keep it moving. Sounds crazy, until you realize that nature has spent billions of years perfecting the art of adaptation and growth, and you’re trying to do it this year. Accelerate evolution, stay ahead of everyone else, and lean into nature’s plan for how you reach new heights.

"Apply evolutionary biology principles to my business strategy in [your industry]. Identify 5 key evolutionary concepts (e.g., natural selection, adaptation, symbiosis) and show how they can be applied to business growth. For each concept, provide a specific strategy that mimics nature's approach to thriving in competitive environments. Explain how these bio-inspired tactics can help my business adapt faster, grow more efficiently, and outpace competitors."

Orchestrate your business symphony

Don’t play the momentum game alone. Grab your team members, customers and suppliers and make sure they’re along for the ride. Not only does this make it enjoyable, it also makes it more likely to work out and create success. Use this prompt to reimagine your business as a grand orchestra, with each person playing a crucial part in the music it makes. With you as the conductor, figure out how to get everyone singing and playing in tune.

"Carry out a thought experiment where you imagine my business as a symphony orchestra, with me as the conductor. Help me 'compose' a business strategy that harmonizes all aspects of my company [describe your company] in [your industry], including important people such as [describe your most important people including team members and suppliers]. Identify the 5 key 'sections' of my business orchestra (e.g., sales, operations, innovation). For each section, suggest how to fine-tune its performance and ensure it plays in perfect sync with the others. Provide a 'score' that outlines how these sections should interact over time to create a crescendo of business success. Include unconventional 'instruments' that could add unique value to the overall composition."

Get unstoppable business momentum: ChatGPT prompts for effortless growth

Find and keep momentum with ChatGPT, so you never have to give yourself a pep talk. Handle challenges with ease when you know your overall trajectory is up. Define your north stay metric to remember why you do it, then create your momentum flywheel so one win turns to several. Become the business whisperer to read between the lines, follow the laws of nature to grow with a new sense of ease, and imagine you’re the conductor of a money-making orchestra. You didn’t start this business to coast. You are capable of more than you currently know. Find that initial momentum and see what’s possible.

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