Is Planning Good for You?

By Hilary Cooke PhD. FIH. MI.

I think operational planning is like the filling in the sandwich. The smoked salmon and cream cheese, the BLT or cheese and ham of business management. Operational Planning fills the gap between strategic intent and tactical planning. It is the space of the line manager, head of department and anyone involved in making operations run smoothly. The space, if you like, between the rock and the hard place. Now that could be a place of extreme discomfort or a place of excitement. Same space, but very different comfort options.?

In my experience, having a plan is like having a big, fat, squashy, cushioned protection in that space - and if it’s a robust plan, then a torch and a flask to go with it.

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You see I am busy too, in fact often overloaded, with a vast array of responsibilities and competing needs constantly tapping and scratching their nails on my awareness window. If I am lucky they are content with making themselves heard and renting space in my head in the daytime.?

But when I get remotely stressed, everything I need to get done prefers to grow in importance and risk, maraud in the dark and keep me awake.?

That’s when I know - I need a better operational plan!

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An operational plan is not a to do list. A good plan defines and shines a light on how I will operate, tie up all the necessary tactical tinkerings and capture all the administration fraudsters*.?

It is also how I will check that my actions are consistently aligned with my strategic intent.?

An operational plan helps to keep me on track and not get lost in the wilderness of overwhelm, or the choppy seas of stress. A good operational plan is like the white stones in the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel that will help you find your way - both forward and back.

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But I am finding, in my consultancy and coaching trottings around my beloved hospitality space, that the good old classic management skills of operational planning have become depleted in post-pandemic practice.?

It almost like we have got so used to putting one foot in front of the other to get through our day that there wasn't time, space or, with rapid pick up and changing business levels, the priority need for operational planning.?

It takes too much time and then we become too busy to have time to make a plan...The result is an anathema to all principles of good management practice and the outcomes are multi-faceted:

Firstly the alignment between strategic intent and day-to-day operational activity gets loose and wobbly, meaning that jobs and relationships with those jobs becomes tactical and transactional in nature. Service teams become just plate-carriers or order-takers. Colleagues lose their sense of purpose or understanding of their contribution - and that has a knock-on effect for engagement and retention.??

Secondly, Managers everywhere are doing the jobs, duties and tasks that their teams should be doing - all the way down the fine-dining food chain. Line managers have to get involved in tactical level operations because the plan is weak and the whole hierarchical structure that our industry is so quaintly built on starts to crumble, with each level working and focusing downwards instead of upwards. That poorly diverted energy and underutilised talent is causing inefficiencies, stress - and sometimes burnout - in all sectors of our industry. I see it almost every day.

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Thirdly, planning is simply good for us. It has all sorts of benefits, from creating the little dopamine bursts that happen when we are looking forward, to calming the threat or reward of neuroscientific-proven certainty and autonomy domains in our brains. Planning is good for mental health as it is a mechanism for feeling in control and for leading our lives.?

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So let's plan to make 2024 the year when we do more planning.

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A good operational plan has a range of components:

? Goal - a clear and measurable goal or success criteria. An articulation of what you are planning to achieve.

? Timeline - by when? Any milestone dates?

? Required resources - what will you need in terms of time, support, help, expertise, training, knowledge, data, help...

? Tasks - what needs to be done along the way - and that helps to connect with resources and delegate some of them

? Budget - cost in general

? Monitoring technique - how you are going to track progress.?

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If you are planning to plan a bit more this year, then contact Brandon Barnham for our free guide to Operational Planning.

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*administration fraudsters are the things that present as being important and fool me into thinking I need to do them as priority. They are just unimportant tasks that, if allowed, will strut around with over-developed egos