Training of personnel in the basics of business planning and analysis

I want to guess! Most of your employees, with the exception, perhaps, of accounting, each time wrinkle your nose when you once again ask them to prepare another weekly, monthly, quarterly plan or report. And it does not matter what these documents are about – sales, marketing effectiveness, financial results.

In general, it does not matter what plans and reports it is)) Even in a situation where a company needs to develop a full-fledged working business plan for the next year, containing SMART goals and interrelated, coordinated schedules for all departments. Most middle managers successfully generate formal annotations, perceiving the planning process as a disgusting and meaningless routine, as an uncomfortable monitoring tool, as a method of disciplinary pressure, an attempt to free their creativity or the management’s doubt about their focus on results. This is partly true, but only in part, and only because managers often do not have a full understanding of the fact that the plan of its division is for the top manager a necessary part of a simple, but necessary as a shovel, consolidated plan for the whole company, through which he tries to ensure a sane final financial result of the business. And if this consolidated plan consists of unconnected lists of different divisions that imply absolutely uncoordinated and often contradictory actions, the shovel of the top manager collapses with lightning speed and he spends 90% of his time coordinating the current actions of various functional units in the course of carrying out their disparate actions.

The task of qualitative planning of the organization’s activities is solved only if three conditions are met:

• The manager really fully understands the importance and necessity for the entire organization of his personal plan, as an integral and necessary part of the overall aggregate action
• He understands how his actions should be linked to the activity of his colleagues, and makes conscious efforts.
• He is really motivated to quality planning and analysis of his activities and his unit

Observance of all three conditions is not such a simple task as it may seem at first glance. The task is complicated for one simple reason – insufficient managerial horizons of average management, lack of a comprehensive vision of the whole picture of the business, a sense of the role of the cog in the car.

Middle managers simply never had the opportunity to be in the role of top manager, director of the company, founder of business. He thinks for the time being only with his functional, specialized categories. In this situation, by definition, there can be neither a full understanding of the actual importance of quality coordinated planning, nor an integrated business picture, nor a complete understanding of the relationship of processes in the organization. Without understanding, there can be no motivation.

While mid-level managers will not try to feel themselves in the role of tops, they will not feel the burden of the director’s responsibility on their own skin, they will not see the whole business from the top, it will be very difficult for you to convince them that qualitative, ambitious but realistic plans are not needed for that to blackmail the manager in the future by their failure to fulfill them, but in order to quickly and consistently go to corporate goals; reports are not needed to punish someone for a bad result, but in order to analyze, to understand together what can be improved in the work. How many of your employees know what SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, competitive forces model or 5 Fayol management functions are? I think that many people know or have heard. And how many people are able to apply these, in general, fairly simple and applied tools in their daily work? I know your answer))

Oddly enough, Virtonomics solves most of the tasks described above to improve motivation, skills of quality planning and broadening the horizons of managerial horizons.

Formulate for your employees an ambitious goal in the game, invite them to write a business plan and manage a full, albeit virtual company. And they will have to, as a leader, not only expand their business horizons, but also learn how to use and operate various financial and analytical reports, learn how to plan activities not only within their functional field, but the whole company. But it will not be a routine and boring task, but an episode in an exciting gameplay. At the output you get not just performers, but effective Managers, on which it is much easier to lean.