Having difficulty implementing multiple initiatives? Try planning in reverse: "backplanning" is an approach that many CFOs and their teams are using to collectively visualize the interdependence among teams' key milestones for initiatives competing for resources and funding.

AuthorCraig, Nick

Imagine you are CFO for a major commercial product company that is looking for ways to grow. Over the last 12 months, several of your teams have suggested key strategic initiatives that could catapult the company's sales from $300 million to $600 million over the next four years.

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However, the failure of any one will spell disaster for all the others, and each team is focused on its own, demanding more funding and resources. These initiatives include:

* Supply chain reducing order-to-delivery from 45 to 3 days

* High potential retention program

* Warranty cost-reduction program

* New sales to national accounts

* Investing in a new product line

* A new customer service initiative

From where you sit, acceding to all of these demands would blow the overall budget with no hope of keeping things in line with your plan to reduce overall costs each year by 5 percent. Further, your CEO admits that this looks impossible, but having promised the board of directors to deliver according to plan, wants you to develop a plan that both keeps all costs under control and delivers all the initiatives on time.

This potential "train wreck" is becoming more and more common. Finance departments have led the charge to help their organizations cut costs, and today's lean organizations have left no slack in the system. At the same time, the world at large has gotten far more complex. The easy-to-implement performance initiatives have been done, and top management teams must now implement a complex series of key initiatives to take their organizations to the next level. No one initiative will carry the day; they will all have to succeed.

This new reality requires a more effective means to control, measure, track and adjust activities across a wide range of initiatives. Detailed project plans, budgets and forecasting plans can be helpful but are often insufficient to coordinate an array of complex linked initiatives and keep them on track.

There is a way to help the company anticipate the looming organizational train wrecks before they happen. Results-Driven Backplanning (or "backplanning") is an approach that many CFOs and their firms have utilized to great success. Working with management teams over a two-to-three-day period, backplanning helps cross-organizational groups collectively visualize the interdependence among the key milestones that must be accomplished for all initiatives.

The resulting output is a one-page "backplan" that...

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