Planning for the real world – it is possible

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Your five-step fitness journey to planning excellence today

As soon as you reach the management level in IT, you’re faced with the prospect of being involved in planning.  For many IT managers that immediately makes them want to go back to their pre-management life!  Planning has traditionally been a painful exercise that rarely deals with realistic numbers and frequently results in IT being blamed by multiple business areas for not being able to do ten different things at once – when eight of those things aren’t defined. 

And things are getting worse.  The disruption businesses are currently seeing in every industry are unprecedented. But let’s not kid ourselves – disruption is the norm in modern business.  Organizations have to be able to deliver consistent enterprise agility – the ability to adjust and pivot for maximum effectiveness and minimal disruption.  Try doing that with legacy approaches to planning! 

Things have to change. Planning has to fundamentally change focus from stability to adaptability.  Traditional planning was based on the premise that things wouldn’t change too much.  Initiatives and investments were planned out for more than a year and any adjustments were rigorously reviewed and controlled.  As the pace of business has accelerated in recent years, the period of time that is planned for has shortened from the one-year-plus model, but the approach has remained largely the same – a focus on stability of plans and rigorous change control. 

Unfortunately, your customers and competitors don’t play by those rules.  Customers expect you to deliver the latest and greatest, leveraging innovative new technology as soon as it begins to emerge.  And competitors are looking for any advantage they can get to seize market share and establish themselves as the player in the market who can respond quickly – someone who can adapt plans to technological advancements and shifting customer demands. 

This is the world you exist in, and this is the world you must thrive in.  To do so you need to improve your planning fitness in multiple areas.  You need to make planning a real top down exercise, driven by leaders.  You need to not only shorten planning windows and frequency, but adjust your approach to one that is designed for a faster cadence.  You must integrate and align your planning with business strategy and recognize that strategy is constantly evolving. 

And at the highest possible levels of performance, you must build adaptive planning into every element of IT and ensure it’s integrated with the business.  Leadership must have made enterprise agility a driving force for the business – looking out at the operating environment it operates within and adjusting plans to keep performance optimized to that environment. 

That’s not easy to achieve, but IT leadership was never easy.  And you’ve seen over the last few months just what happens when your business isn’t as agile as you thought.  Examine your own planning fitness and develop your own program to better planning health with ServiceNow’s planning fitness tools.  To learn more, download the eBook The IT Fitness Journey: Planning