Build plans

Senior management can create a corporate plan to which managers can attach their own operational plans to support assigned corporate strategies. In turn, individual units can develop detailed plans to support selected operational plans.

When starting to build the corporate plan, work on building the corporate plan objects. After the corporate portion of the plan is established, plans for other organizational units can be built based on the corporate plan objects, such as strategies. Continued building can be delegated to planners in the various units.

You should determine which plan objects a unit needs in order to continue the building process by filling in additional levels of detail. This can also be done as a plan object is defined.

When an object is created, it is automatically associated with the currently selected unit. You can associate a plan object with other units. A planner only needs to set the associations for the plan objects at the level that is the start of where that organization unit will add additional plan objects. You do not need to set an association at each ancestor of that strategy. This is done automatically for you.

After a plan has been built, it can be used to monitor the performance of the plan. Each plan object can have one associated measure regarding performance. The performance can be monitored and reported as the plan is being executed. For example, if the measure for a tactic is 20 public speaking opportunities as part of a PR campaign, you can track whether it actually gets done. Likewise, the measure can be to keep expenses for each quarter within 5% of target.

Measures are set at an organizational leaf-node unit level but can be assigned to multiple units where they can have multiple targets.

Measure values can be financial (such as revenue or margin per product), non-financial (such as training hours completed or customer satisfaction ratings) and logical (such as yes/no). The format of the measure can be set which is then reflected in reports.

Measures can be specified in the plan using three methods: manual data entry, data from CPM views, or data from SQL views. Connection information to CPM views and SQL views must be established using the Edit Data Sources option in the Application Wizard.

Strategy Management supports more than one planner building a plan. Planners must coordinate the building with others to prevent overwriting of changes. The last saved change is kept by Strategy Management. Coordination and division of labor is needed for group building of a plan.