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How To Write the Operations Plan Section of the Business Plan

Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.

Stage of Development Section

Production process section, the bottom line, frequently asked questions (faqs).

The operations plan is the section of your business plan that gives an overview of your workflow, supply chains, and similar aspects of your business. Any key details of how your business physically produces goods or services will be included in this section.

You need an operations plan to help others understand how you'll deliver on your promise to turn a profit. Keep reading to learn what to include in your operations plan.

Key Takeaways

• The operations plan section should include general operational details that help investors understand the physical details of your vision.
• Details in the operations plan include information about any physical plants, equipment, assets, and more.
• The operations plan can also serve as a checklist for startups; it includes a list of everything that must be done to start turning a profit.

In your business plan , the operations plan section describes the physical necessities of your business's operation, such as your physical location, facilities, and equipment. Depending on what kind of business you'll be operating, it may also include information about inventory requirements, suppliers, and a description of the manufacturing process.

Keeping focused on the bottom line will help you organize this part of the business plan.

Think of the operating plan as an outline of the capital and expense requirements your business will need to operate from day to day.

You need to do two things for the reader of your business plan in the operations section: show what you've done so far to get your business off the ground and demonstrate that you understand the manufacturing or delivery process of producing your product or service.

When you're writing this section of the operations plan, start by explaining what you've done to date to get the business operational, then follow up with an explanation of what still needs to be done. The following should be included:

Production Workflow

A high-level, step-by-step description of how your product or service will be made, identifying the problems that may occur in the production process. Follow this with a subsection titled "Risks," which outlines the potential problems that may interfere with the production process and what you're going to do to negate these risks. If any part of the production process can expose employees to hazards, describe how employees will be trained in dealing with safety issues. If hazardous materials will be used, describe how these will be safely stored, handled, and disposed.

Industry Association Memberships

Show your awareness of your industry's local, regional, or national standards and regulations by telling which industry organizations you are already a member of and which ones you plan to join. This is also an opportunity to outline what steps you've taken to comply with the laws and regulations that apply to your industry. 

Supply Chains

An explanation of who your suppliers are and their prices, terms, and conditions. Describe what alternative arrangements you have made or will make if these suppliers let you down.

Quality Control

An explanation of the quality control measures that you've set up or are going to establish. For example, if you intend to pursue some form of quality control certification such as ISO 9000, describe how you will accomplish this.

While you can think of the stage of the development part of the operations plan as an overview, the production process section lays out the details of your business's day-to-day operations. Remember, your goal for writing this business plan section is to demonstrate your understanding of your product or service's manufacturing or delivery process.

When writing this section, you can use the headings below as subheadings and then provide the details in paragraph format. Leave out any topic that does not apply to your particular business.

Do an outline of your business's day-to-day operations, including your hours of operation and the days the business will be open. If the business is seasonal, be sure to say so.

The Physical Plant

Describe the type, site, and location of premises for your business. If applicable, include drawings of the building, copies of lease agreements, and recent real estate appraisals. You need to show how much the land or buildings required for your business operations are worth and tell why they're important to your proposed business.

The same goes for equipment. Besides describing the equipment necessary and how much of it you need, you also need to include its worth and cost and explain any financing arrangements.

Make a list of your assets , such as land, buildings, inventory, furniture, equipment, and vehicles. Include legal descriptions and the worth of each asset.

Special Requirements

If your business has any special requirements, such as water or power needs, ventilation, drainage, etc., provide the details in your operating plan, as well as what you've done to secure the necessary permissions.

State where you're going to get the materials you need to produce your product or service and explain what terms you've negotiated with suppliers.

Explain how long it takes to produce a unit and when you'll be able to start producing your product or service. Include factors that may affect the time frame of production and describe how you'll deal with potential challenges such as rush orders.

Explain how you'll keep  track of inventory .

Feasibility

Describe any product testing, price testing, or prototype testing that you've done on your product or service.

Give details of product cost estimates.

Once you've worked through this business plan section, you'll not only have a detailed operations plan to show your readers, but you'll also have a convenient list of what needs to be done next to make your business a reality. Writing this document gives you a chance to crystalize your business ideas into a clear checklist that you can reference. As you check items off the list, use it to explain your vision to investors, partners, and others within your organization.

What is an operations plan?

An operations plan is one section of a company's business plan. This section conveys the physical requirements for your business's operations, including supply chains, workflow , and quality control processes.

What is the main difference between the operations plan and the financial plan?

The operations plan and financial plan tackle similar issues, in that they seek to explain how the business will turn a profit. The operations plan approaches this issue from a physical perspective, such as property, routes, and locations. The financial plan explains how revenue and expenses will ultimately lead to the business's success.

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Production Plan in Business Plan: A Comprehensive Guide to Success

February 26, 2024

In any business venture, a solid production plan is crucial for success. A production plan serves as a roadmap that outlines the steps, resources, and strategies required to manufacture products or deliver services efficiently. By carefully crafting a production plan within a business plan, entrepreneurs can ensure optimal utilisation of resources, timely delivery, cost efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of creating an effective production plan in a business plan , exploring its key components, strategies, and the importance of aligning it with overall business objectives .

Key Takeaways on Production Plans in Business Planning

• A production plan : a detailed outline that guides efficient product manufacturing or service delivery.
• Importance of a production plan : provides a roadmap for operations, optimises resource utilisation, and aligns with customer demand.
• Key components : demand forecasting, capacity planning, inventory management, resource allocation, and quality assurance.
• Strategies : lean manufacturing, JIT inventory, automation and technology integration, supplier relationship management, and continuous improvement.
• Benefits of a well-executed production plan : improved efficiency, reduced costs, enhanced product quality, and increased profitability.

What is a Production Plan?

A production Seamless Searches plan is a detailed outline that specifies the processes, resources, timelines, and strategies required to convert raw materials into finished goods or deliver services. It serves as a blueprint for the entire production cycle, guiding decision-making and resource allocation. The production plan considers factors such as demand forecasting, capacity planning, inventory management, and quality assurance to ensure efficient operations and optimal customer satisfaction.

Why is a Production Plan Important in a Business Plan?

The inclusion of a production plan in a business plan is vital for several reasons. First and foremost, it provides a clear roadmap for business operations, helping entrepreneurs and managers make informed decisions related to production processes. A well-developed production plan ensures that resources are utilised efficiently, minimising wastage and optimising productivity.

Additionally, a production plan allows businesses to align their production capabilities with customer demand. By forecasting market trends and analysing customer needs, businesses can develop a production plan that caters to current and future demands, thus avoiding overstocking or understocking situations.

Furthermore, a production plan helps businesses enhance their competitive advantage. By implementing strategies such as lean manufacturing and automation, companies can streamline their production processes, reduce costs, improve product quality, and ultimately outperform competitors.

Key Components of a Production Plan

To create an effective production plan, it is crucial to consider several key components. These components work together to ensure efficient operations and successful fulfilment of customer demands. Let's explore each component in detail.

Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting is a critical aspect of production planning. By analysing historical data, market trends, and customer behaviour, businesses can predict future demand for their products or services. Accurate demand forecasting allows companies to optimise inventory levels, plan production capacity, and ensure timely delivery to customers.

One approach to demand forecasting is quantitative analysis, which involves analysing historical sales data to identify patterns and make predictions. Another approach is qualitative analysis, which incorporates market research, customer surveys, and expert opinions to gauge demand fluctuations. By combining both methods, businesses can develop a robust demand forecast, minimising the risk of underproduction or overproduction. Utilising a free notion template for demand forecasting can further streamline this process, allowing businesses to organise and analyse both quantitative and qualitative data efficiently in one centralised location.

Capacity Planning

Capacity planning involves determining the optimal production capacity required to meet projected demand. This includes assessing the production capabilities of existing resources, such as machinery, equipment, and labour, and identifying any gaps that need to be addressed. By conducting a thorough capacity analysis, businesses can ensure that their production capacity aligns with customer demand, avoiding bottlenecks or excess capacity.

An effective capacity plan takes into account factors such as production cycle times, labour availability, equipment maintenance, and production lead times. It helps businesses allocate resources efficiently, minimise production delays, and maintain a consistent level of output to meet customer expectations.

Inventory Management

Efficient inventory management is crucial for a successful production plan. It involves balancing the cost of holding inventory with the risk of stockouts. By maintaining optimal inventory levels, businesses can reduce carrying costs while ensuring that sufficient stock is available to fulfil customer orders.

Inventory management techniques, such as the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) model and Just-in-Time (JIT) inventory system, help businesses strike the right balance between inventory investment and customer demand. These methods consider factors such as order frequency, lead time, and carrying costs to optimise inventory levels and minimise the risk of excess or insufficient stock.

Resource Allocation

Resource allocation plays a pivotal role in a production plan. It involves assigning available resources, such as labour, materials, and equipment, to specific production tasks or projects. Effective resource allocation ensures that resources are utilised optimally, avoiding underutilisation or overutilisation.

To allocate resources efficiently, businesses must consider factors such as skill requirements, resource availability, project timelines, and cost constraints. By conducting a thorough resource analysis and implementing resource allocation strategies, businesses can streamline production processes, minimise bottlenecks, and maximise productivity.

Quality Assurance

Maintaining high-quality standards is essential for any production plan. Quality assurance involves implementing measures to monitor and control the quality of products or services throughout the production process. By adhering to quality standards and conducting regular inspections, businesses can minimise defects, ensure customer satisfaction, and build a positive brand reputation.

Quality assurance techniques, such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma , help businesses identify and rectify any quality-related issues. These methodologies involve continuous monitoring, process improvement, and employee training to enhance product quality and overall operational efficiency.

In addition to the core components of a production plan, it's also important for businesses to consider the broader aspects of their business strategy, including marketing and advertising. Understanding the costs and returns of different marketing approaches is crucial for comprehensive business planning. For instance, direct response advertising costs can vary significantly, but they offer the advantage of measurable responses from potential customers. This type of advertising can be a valuable strategy for businesses looking to directly engage with their target audience and track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Strategies for Developing an Effective Production Plan

Developing an effective production plan requires implementing various strategies and best practices. By incorporating these strategies into the production planning process, businesses can optimise operations and drive success. Let's explore some key strategies in detail.

Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is a systematic Seamless Searches approach aimed at eliminating waste and improving efficiency in production processes. It emphasises the concept of continuous improvement and focuses on creating value for the customer while minimising non-value-added activities.

By adopting lean manufacturing principles, such as just-in-time production, standardised work processes, and visual management, businesses can streamline operations, reduce lead times, and eliminate unnecessary costs. Lean manufacturing not only improves productivity but also enhances product quality and customer satisfaction.

Just-in-Time (JIT) Inventory

Just-in-Time (JIT) inventory is a strategy that aims to minimise inventory levels by receiving goods or materials just when they are needed for production. This strategy eliminates the need for excess inventory storage, reducing carrying costs and the risk of obsolete inventory.

By implementing a JIT inventory system, businesses can optimise cash flow, reduce storage space requirements, and improve overall supply chain efficiency. However, it requires robust coordination with suppliers, accurate demand forecasting, and efficient logistics management to ensure timely delivery of materials.

Automation and Technology Integration

Automation and technology integration play a crucial role in modern production planning. By leveraging technology, businesses can streamline processes, enhance productivity, and reduce human error. Automation can be implemented in various aspects of production, including material handling, assembly, testing, and quality control.

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is a fundamental principle of effective production planning. It involves regularly evaluating production processes, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing changes to enhance efficiency and quality.

By fostering a culture of continuous improvement, businesses can drive innovation, optimise resource utilisation, and stay ahead of competitors. Techniques such as Kaizen, Six Sigma, and value stream mapping can help businesses identify inefficiencies, eliminate waste, and streamline production workflows.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the role of a production plan in business planning.

A1: A production plan plays a crucial role in business planning by providing a roadmap for efficient production processes. It helps align production capabilities with customer demand, optimise resource utilisation, and ensure timely delivery of products or services.

How does a production plan affect overall business profitability?

A2: A well-developed production plan can significantly impact business profitability. By optimising production processes, reducing costs, and enhancing product quality, businesses can improve their profit margins and gain a competitive edge in the market.

What are the common challenges faced in production planning?

A3: Production planning can present various challenges, such as inaccurate demand forecasting, capacity constraints, supply chain disruptions, and quality control issues. Overcoming these challenges requires robust planning, effective communication, and the implementation of appropriate strategies and technologies.

What is the difference between short-term and long-term production planning?

A4: Short-term production planning focuses on immediate production requirements, such as daily or weekly schedules. Long-term production planning, on the other hand, involves strategic decisions related to capacity expansion, technology investments, and market expansion, spanning months or even years.

How can a production plan be adjusted to accommodate changes in demand?

A5: To accommodate changes in demand, businesses can adopt flexible production strategies such as agile manufacturing or dynamic scheduling. These approaches allow for quick adjustments to production levels, resource allocation, and inventory management based on fluctuating customer demand.

In conclusion, a well-crafted production plan is essential for business success. By incorporating a production plan into a comprehensive business plan, entrepreneurs can optimise resource utilisation, meet customer demands, enhance product quality, and drive profitability. Through effective demand forecasting, capacity planning, inventory management, resource allocation, and quality assurance, businesses can streamline production processes and gain a competitive edge in the market.

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How to Write an Operations Plan Section of your Business Plan

Free Operations Plan Template

Ayush Jalan

• December 14, 2023

Your business plan is an elaborate set of instructions stating how to run your business to achieve objectives and goals. Each section describes a part of the process of reaching your desired goal. Similarly, the operations plan section of your business plan explains the production and supply of your product.

An operations plan is formed to turn plans into actions. It uses the information you gathered from the analysis of the market , customers, and competitors mentioned in the previous parts of your business plan and allows for the execution of relevant strategies to achieve desired results.

What Is an Operations Plan?

An operations plan is an in-depth description of your daily business activities centered on achieving the goals and objectives described in the previous sections of your business plan. It outlines the processes, activities, responsibilities of various departments and the timeframe of the execution.

The operations section of your business plan explains in detail the role of a team or department in the collective accomplishment of your goals. In other words, it’s a strategic allocation of physical, financial, and human resources toward reaching milestones within a specific timeframe.

A well-defined operational plan section of your business plan should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who is responsible for a specific task or department?
• What are the tasks that need to be completed?
• Where will these operations take place?
• When should the tasks be completed? What are the deadlines?
• How will the tasks be performed? Is there a standard procedure?
• How much is it going to cost to complete these tasks?

How to Write an Operations Plan Section?

Creating an operational plan has two major stages, both addressing different aspects of your company. The first stage includes the work that has been done so far, whereas the second stage describes it in detail.

1. Development Phase

In this stage, you mention what you’ve done to get your business operations up and running. Explain what you aim to change and improvise in the processes. These are the elements your development section will contain:

Production workflow

: Explain all the steps involved in creating your product. This should be a highly informative, elaborate description of the steps. Here, you also mention any inefficiencies that exist and talk about the actions that need to be taken to tackle them.

Supply chains

Quality control, 2. manufacturing phase.

The development stage acquaints the reader with the functioning of your business, while the manufacturing stage describes the day-to-day operation.

This includes the following elements:

Outline of daily activities:

Tools and equipment:, special requirements:, raw materials:, productions:, feasibility:, why do you need an operations plan.

An operations plan is essentially an instruction manual about the workings of your business. It offers insight into your business operations. It helps investors assess your credibility and understand the structure of your operations and predict your financial requirements.

An operations plan reflects the real-time application of a business plan.

Internally, an operations plan works as a guide, which helps your employees and managers to know their responsibilities. It also helps them understand how to execute their tasks in the desired manner—all whilst keeping account of deadlines.

The operations plan helps identify and cut the variances between planned and actual performance and makes necessary changes. It helps you visualize how your operations affect revenue and gives you an idea of how and when you need to implement new strategies to maximize profits.

Advantages of Preparing an Operations Plan:

Offers clarity:, contains a roadmap:, sets a benchmark:, operations plan essentials.

Now that you have understood the contents of an operations plan and how it should be written, you can continue drafting one for your business plan. But before doing so, take a look at these key components you need to remember while creating your operational plan.

• Your operations plan is fundamentally a medium for implementing your strategic plan. Hence, it’s crucial to have a solid strategic plan to write an effective operations plan.
• Focus on setting SMART goals and prioritizing the most important ones. This helps you create a clear and crisp operations plan. Focusing on multiple goals will make your plan complicated and hard to implement.
• To measure your goals, use leading indicators instead of lagging indicators. Leading indicators is a metric that helps you track your progress and predict when you will reach a goal. On the other hand, lagging indicators can only confirm a trend by taking the past as input but cannot predict the accomplishment of a goal.
• It is essential to choose the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) . It is a good practice to involve all your teams while you decide your KPIs.
• An operations plan should effectively communicate your goals, metrics, deadlines, and all the processes.

Now you’re all set to write an operations plan section for your business plan . To give you a headstart, we have created an operations plan example.

Operations Plan Example

Operations plan by a book publishing house

Track and Accomplish Goals With an Operations Plan

Drafting the operations plan section of your business plan can be tricky due to the uncertainties of the business environment and the risks associated with it. Depending on variables like your market analysis, product development, supply chain, etc., the complexity of writing an operations plan will vary.

The core purpose here is to put all the pieces together to create a synergy effect and get the engine of your business running. Create an effective operations plan to convey competence to investors and clarity to employees.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What role does the operations plan play in securing funding for a business.

The operations plan defines the clear goals of your business and what actions will be taken on a daily basis to reach them. So, investors need to know where your business stands, and it will prove the viability of the goals helping you in getting funded.

What are the factors affecting the operations plan?

• The mission of the company
• Goals to be achieved
• Finance and resources your company will need

Can an operations plan be created for both start-up and established businesses?

Yes, both a startup and a small business needs an operations plan to get a better idea of the roadmap they want for their business.

About the Author

Ayush is a writer with an academic background in business and marketing. Being a tech-enthusiast, he likes to keep a sharp eye on the latest tech gadgets and innovations. When he's not working, you can find him writing poetry, gaming, playing the ukulele, catching up with friends, and indulging in creative philosophies.

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Expertly Writing the Operations Plan Section of Your Business Plan

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Operational plans are important for any effective business plan . They provide a roadmap for how the company will operate on a day-to-day basis. The operational strategic plan should outline the company’s goals and objectives, as well as the strategies and actions that will be taken to achieve them.

Business Operations Section of a Business Plan

The operational plan or operations section of a business plan is where you describe how your business will function on a day-to-day basis. This includes everything from the resources you’ll need to run your business, to the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks, to the processes and procedures you’ll use to get work done.

Purpose of the Operational Plan Section of a Business Plan

An operational plan is essential for any business because it provides a roadmap for how it will function. It ensures that everyone involved in the business is on the same page and knows what their roles and responsibilities are. Having an operational plan also makes it easier to track and accomplish goals, while driving cost reduction and improving overall results. Finally, your operations plan section helps show readers that you can turn your vision and goals into reality.

Benefits of an Operations Plan Include:

• Identifying the key processes your company must perform to achieve its goals
• Mapping out short-term and long-term milestones so you have specific goals and a roadmap for achieving them
• Understanding the human and other resources required to execute your vision

Writing an Operations Section of a Business Plan

When writing the operations section of a business plan, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. First, be sure to describe the resources that will be required to run your business. This includes everything from office space and equipment to human resources. Next, detail the processes and procedures that will be used to get work done. Be as specific as possible so that there is no confusion about how things should be done. Finally, identify the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks. This includes both employees and contractors.

Tracking Key Performance Indicators with Operational Planning

As a business owner, it’s important to track your progress against your company goals. This is where KPIs come in. KPIs are performance indicators and an important part of creating a strategic plan that can help you track your progress and identify areas of improvement. You should document your KPIs in the operation plan of your business plan

There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing KPIs for your business:

• Make sure that the KPIs you choose are relevant to your company’s goals.
• Choose KPIs that can be easily measured.
• Avoid choosing too many KPIs, as this can be overwhelming. Stick to a few key ones that will give you the most insights into your business’s progress.
• Set realistic targets for each KPI. This will help you track your progress and identify areas of improvement.
• Review your KPIs on a regular basis to ensure that they are still relevant and accurate, while also being in line with strategic plans.

Some Examples of KPIs that You Could Track with an Operational Plan

When creating an operations plan, it’s important to track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your progress against your company goals. Some examples of KPIs that you could track are:

• Sales growth
• Delivery times
• Customer satisfaction ratings
• Product Quality
• Production Process
• Employee retention
• Operational costs

Creating an operational plan with KPIs will help you track your progress, identify areas of improvement, improve strategic planning and make necessary changes to reach your company’s strategic objective.

Example of an Operations Section of a Business Plan

Here is what an operations plan example might look like:

The XYZ Company will require the following resources to operate:

• 1,000 square feet of office space
• $10,000 for office furniture and equipment
• 3 full-time employees
• 2 part-time employees
• 1 contractor

The XYZ Company will use the following processes and procedures to get work done:

• All new clients will be contacted within 24 hours of the initial inquiry
• Initial consultations will be scheduled within 48 hours of contact
• Proposals will be presented within 10 days of the initial consultation
• Work will begin within 2 weeks of proposal acceptance

The following people will be responsible for carrying out these tasks:

• John Smith, full-time employee, will contact new clients
• Jane Doe, full-time employee, will schedule initial consultations
• John Smith and Jane Doe will conduct initial consultations
• John Smith and Jane Doe will prepare proposals
• John Smith and Jane Doe will manage projects
• Joe Johnson, contractor, will provide support as needed

An operations plan is a critical part of any business planning work. It provides a roadmap for how the business will function on a day-to-day basis. This includes everything from the resources you’ll need to run your business, to the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks, to the processes and procedures you’ll use to get work done. Having operational plans in place will ensure that everyone involved in the business is on the same page and knows what their roles and responsibilities are. It will also make it easier to track and accomplish goals.

Key Takeaways

A few key things to remember when writing your operations plan:

• Describe the resources that will be required to run your business
• Detail the processes and procedures that will be used to get work done
• Identify the people who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks

Following these tips will help you create a comprehensive and effective operations plan for your business.

A strategic plan is one of the critical components of any successful company. The operations plan outlines the roadmap for your business, outlining the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. If you’re not sure where to start, we can help. Our team of experts has created a comprehensive business plan template that will guide you through the process of creating an operational plan tailored to your specific business needs. Ready to get started? Download our template today and get access to all the tools and information you need to create a thriving business.

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Business Plan Operational Plan - Everything You Need to Know

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on the business plan operational plan. A fundamental component of any effective business plan and a key component of growth  As a business owner, executive, or manager, you understand that a well-articulated strategy is crucial for the success and growth of your venture. But have you ever stopped to ponder how this strategy is executed on a day-to-day basis? How do we transform those lofty goals into tangible, everyday actions? This is where an operational plan comes into play. An operational plan outlines the practical details of how your business will operate and deliver on its strategic goals. It describes the inner workings of your business, detailing everything from your daily operations and production processes to your team's roles and responsibilities.  In this guide we will delve into the purpose and scope of an operational plan, its essential elements, and how to develop one effectively. We'll also share valuable tips, best practices, and common pitfalls to avoid. 

Table of Contents

• Operational Plan - The Purpose
• The Essential Elements
• Description of Operations
• Steps for Creating Operational Plan
• Tips & Best Practices

Real-Life Case Study

• Common Pitfalls
• Final Thoughts

Business Plan Operational Plan - The Purpose

The role of an operational plan in a business cannot be overstated. This fundamental document is a strategic guide that outlines the direction, timelines, and resources necessary to achieve specific objectives within an organisation. An operational plan is the driving force behind the execution of your business strategy. It allows you to map out clear and attainable operational goals that align with your overall strategic objectives, breaking them down into manageable, actionable steps.  Whilst acting as a map for your business you can also use to track performance via measurable objectives.

Scope of an Operational Plan in Day-to-Day Operations

The business plan operational plan should detail key elements such as the operational processes, resource allocation, tasks, and timelines. From personnel and location to inventory, suppliers, and operating hours - the operational plan touches every aspect of your business. It's a living document, evolving and changing as your business grows and adapts to market dynamics and industry trends.

Remember, the opening of your Executive Summary sets the tone for the entire document. Make it memorable and compelling to encourage the reader to continue exploring.

Business Plan Operational Plan - The Essential Elements

Creating an operational plan requires thoughtful consideration of several vital components that collectively represent the full breadth of your company's operations. Each one plays a crucial role in defining the day-to-day activities that will lead to the fulfilment of your strategic objectives.

Description of the Business Operations

Every operational plan starts with a comprehensive description of the business operations. This includes outlining your production process, operations workflow, and supply chain management. Defining these processes in clear terms provides a concrete vision of how products or services will be created and delivered, identifying the necessary resources and potential bottlenecks along the way.

People are the lifeblood of your business, and it's essential to define their roles and responsibilities within the operational plan. This involves outlining the team's structure, detailing who is responsible for what, and defining key performance indicators (KPIs) for each role. By assigning clear responsibilities, you ensure the efficient use of human resources and promote accountability.

Your business location and the physical resources at your disposal play a crucial role in your operational plan. Detail the premises your business will operate from, the equipment required, and any associated costs. Whether you're operating from a single office, managing multiple retail outlets, or running a home-based online business, defining your operational space is crucial.

Effective inventory management is crucial for maintaining smooth operations, particularly for businesses dealing with physical products. Your operational plan should outline how you will manage your supplies, including how often you'll restock, which vendors you'll use, and how you'll handle storage and distribution. Remember, balancing supply with demand is key to avoiding unnecessary costs or stockouts.

Your operational plan needs to address your suppliers - who they are, what terms and agreements you have with them, and how you will manage these relationships. The reliability and quality of your suppliers can greatly affect your operations, making this a critical consideration in your planning process.

When constructed effectively, these elements come together to form an operational plan that is clear, comprehensive, and actionable. In the next section, we'll explore the steps to develop such a plan, and later, we'll offer some tips and best practices for bringing your operational plan to life. Stay tuned! Looking an industry specific guide to business plans, then check out our business plan guides homepage .

Steps for Developing an Operational Plan

Creating a comprehensive and effective operational plan involves careful planning, clear communication, and continuous monitoring and evaluation. Let's explore these steps in detail:

• 1. Setting Clear Operational Goals and Objectives: The first step towards developing an operational plan is defining what you want to achieve operationally within a given period. These goals should align with your strategic business objectives and be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).For instance, if your strategic goal is to increase market share, your operational objective might be to ramp up production by a certain percentage within the next quarter. Or, if you aim to improve customer satisfaction, you might focus on improving the quality and durability of the product.
• Regular Monitoring and Evaluation: With your operational goals in place, the next step is to monitor progress and evaluate performance regularly. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics should be set for each operational goal. These could range from production volumes and delivery times to quality measures and cost efficiency.Consistently monitoring these metrics allows you to measure progress, identify any potential issues or bottlenecks early on, and adjust your operational plan as necessary.
• Communication: This is a crucial when implementing your operational plan. Ensure all stakeholders, including team members, suppliers, and partners, are aware of the plan and understand their roles within it.Hold regular meetings to update everyone on progress and address any challenges or changes in the plan. Remember, your operational plan should be a living document, flexible enough to adapt to changes and updates as required.

Business Plan Operational Plan - Tips and Best Practices

Creating an operational plan that works requires more than just defining goals and setting performance metrics. There are nuances and best practices that can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your operational plan. Here are a few tips to guide you:

• Involve Your Team : The people responsible for executing the operational plan should also contribute to its creation. Encourage your team to share their ideas, challenges, and insights. Their first-hand experience can lead to more practical, achievable operational plans. Besides, team involvement promotes ownership and commitment to the plan's execution.
• Keep It Flexible : Operational plans need to be adaptable to accommodate changes in the business environment, such as market dynamics, customer preferences, or new regulations. Regularly review and update your plan to ensure it remains relevant and effective. Remember, the operational plan is a guide, not a set-in-stone document.
• Be Specific : Avoid ambiguity in your operational plan. Use clear, concise language and provide detailed action plans, including what needs to be done, by whom, when, and with what resources. This clarity reduces misunderstanding and keeps everyone on the same page.
• Use Technology : Leverage the power of technology to enhance your operational efficiency. There are numerous tools and software available that can help with project management, process automation, data analysis, and more. Use these tools to streamline your operations, track performance, and improve communication.
• Consistency with the Business Plan : Ensure your operational plan aligns with your broader business strategy. This alignment ensures that your day-to-day operations contribute effectively to achieving your long-term business objectives.

By applying these tips and best practices, you can create an operational plan that's not only effective but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and strategic alignment in your organisation.

To further illustrate the importance of a well-executed operational plan, let's look at a real-life case study - the global tech giant, Apple Inc. Apple's operational plan is a testament to the company's relentless focus on precision, quality, and groundbreaking innovation. One key operational strategy that Apple uses is its tight control over its supply chain.

• Description of Business Operations: Apple's business operations are highly integrated and efficient. They manufacture and market a variety of products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, and services like iCloud and Apple Music. Their production process is complex, involving design, prototyping, manufacturing, and distribution, often happening across different continents.
• Personnel: Apple's workforce is highly specialised. Each team and department has clearly defined roles and responsibilities, whether it's designing new products, managing supplier relationships, or ensuring quality control. Employees at Apple are encouraged to think differently, fostering a culture of innovation.
•  Location: Apple operates in multiple locations worldwide, including its iconic headquarters, Apple Park, in Cupertino, California. The company also has a network of retail stores across the globe and contracts with manufacturing facilities, primarily in Asia.
•  Inventory: Apple's inventory management is legendary for its efficiency. Through just-in-time inventory practices, Apple reduces storage costs and minimises the risk of stock obsolescence, contributing to its streamlined operations and impressive profit margins.
• Suppliers: Apple has a vast network of suppliers from around the world. It maintains strong relationships with these suppliers and holds them to strict standards of quality and ethical business practices, ensuring the integrity and excellence of its products.

Apple's operational plan aligns seamlessly with its business strategy, focusing on innovation, quality, and customer experience. This has allowed the company to maintain its status as a market leader and pioneer in the tech industry. This case study illustrates how an effective operational plan can turn a strategic vision into a successful reality. In the next section, we'll delve into common pitfalls to avoid when creating your operational plan.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

As you embark on developing an operational plan for your business, it's crucial to be aware of some common pitfalls that can hinder your plan's effectiveness. Here, we outline these potential obstacles and provide advice on how to avoid them.

• Lack of Alignment with Strategic Goals: One of the most common mistakes is a disconnect between the operational plan and the company's strategic goals. Your operational plan should directly support and drive towards achieving these objectives. Ensure all operational goals, processes, and tasks align with your overarching business vision.
• Overly Complex or Unrealistic Plans: While an operational plan needs to be comprehensive, it also needs to be practical and achievable. Avoid creating overly complex plans that your team cannot implement or that require resources beyond your means. Strike a balance between thoroughness and simplicity for a more manageable plan.
• Neglecting to Involve the Team: Your team members are the ones who will execute the operational plan, and neglecting to involve them in its creation can lead to resistance or confusion. Make sure your team is part of the planning process, understands the plan, and is committed to its implementation.
• Ignoring Market Changes: A business doesn't operate in a vacuum. Failing to consider external factors such as market trends, customer behaviour, and economic conditions can derail your operational plan. Ensure your plan is flexible and adaptable to respond to changing circumstances.
• Insufficient Monitoring and Evaluation: An operational plan is not a set-and-forget document. Regular monitoring and evaluation are critical to assess progress, identify bottlenecks, and make necessary adjustments. Make sure you set measurable KPIs and allocate resources to track and review them.Avoiding these common pitfalls will significantly enhance the effectiveness of your business plan operational plan. With a solid operational plan in place, your business is well-positioned to achieve its strategic objectives, driving growth, and success.

Wrapping It All Up

Operational planning plays a vital role in any business, acting as a roadmap to direct daily operations and align them with the strategic goals of the company. As we have seen in this blog post, creating an operational plan involves several important components and steps, from defining clear goals to continuous monitoring and evaluation. Remember, the key to an effective operational plan is to keep it flexible, involve your team and maintain alignment with your business plan. If you implement those principles and regularly review and update you will have set a solid foundation for future business growth. We wish you all the best on your operational planning journey, and remember - every step you take towards detailed and thoughtful planning is a step towards long-term success and growth for your business. If you require any further help on other sections of your business plan, visit our Learning Zone for several in-depth guides.

Business Plan Operational Plan - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

To wrap up this guide, let's address some frequently asked questions about operational plans in business.

• What is the difference between a strategic plan and an operational plan? A strategic plan outlines a company's long-term vision, objectives, and strategies for achieving those objectives. It's a high-level roadmap for the direction the company intends to go. On the other hand, an operational plan details the day-to-day activities and resources necessary to achieve the strategic goals. It's the 'action plan' that brings the strategic plan to life.
• How often should an operational plan be reviewed? The frequency of review may vary depending on your business size, type, and industry, but generally, it is a good idea to review your operational plan at least quarterly. The regular review ensures that the plan is still relevant and effective, allowing for adjustments as business conditions change.
• How long should an operational plan be? There is no set length for an operational plan, as it will depend on the complexity of the operations. It needs to be comprehensive enough to cover all operational aspects of the business but concise enough to be understandable and manageable.
• Who is responsible for creating an operational plan? While the business owner or top management usually leads the creation of an operational plan, it should involve input from all levels of the organisation. Each department or team can provide valuable insights into their operations, challenges, and opportunities, leading to a more realistic and effective plan.
• How can I measure the success of my operational plan? The success of an operational plan is measured by how effectively it helps achieve the strategic objectives. Regular monitoring of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to your operational goals will provide a clear indication of your plan's success. If these KPIs are consistently met, your operational plan is likely successful. If not, adjustments may be needed.

• Grasshopper

Operations Plan

• Lesson Materials Operations Plan Worksheet
• Completion time About 40 minutes

The operations section of your business plan is where you explain – in detail – you company's objectives, goals, procedures, and timeline. An operations plan is helpful for investors, but it's also helpful for you and employees because it pushes you to think about tactics and deadlines.

In the previous course, you outlined your company's strategic plan, which answers questions about your business mission. An operational plan outlines the steps you'll take to complete your business mission.

Your operations plan should be able to answer the following:

• Who – The personnel or departments who are in charge of completing specific tasks.
• What – A description of what each department is responsible for.
• Where – The information on where daily operations will be taking place.
• When –The deadlines for when the tasks and goals are to be completed.
• How much – The cost amount each department needs to complete their tasks.

In this session, we explain each item to include in your operations plan.

Goals and Objectives

The key to an operations plan is having a clear objective and goal everyone is focused on completing. In this section of your plan, you'll clearly state what your company's operational objective is.

Your operational objective is different than your company's overall objective. In Course One , you fleshed out what your strategic objective was. Your operational objective explains how you intend to complete your strategic objective.

In order to create an efficient operational objective, think SMART:

• Specific – Be clear on what you want employees to achieve.
• Measurable – Be able to quantify the goal in order to track progress.
• Attainable & Realistic – It's great to be ambitious but make sure you aren't setting your team up for failure. Create a goal that everyone is motivated to complete with the resources available.
• Timely – Provide a deadline so everyone has a date they are working towards.

Different departments will have different operational objectives. However, each department objective should help the company reach the main objective. In addition, operational objectives change; the objectives aren't intended to be permanents or long term. The timeline should be scheduled with your company's long-term goals in mind.

Let's look at the following example for a local pizza business objective:

• Strategic objective : To deliver pizza all over Eastern Massachusetts.
• Technology department operational objective : To create a mobile app by January 2017 to offer a better user experience.
• Marketing department operational objective : To increase website visitors by 50% by January 2017 by advertising on radio, top local food websites, and print ads.
• Sales department operational objective : To increase delivery sales by 30%, by targeting 3 of Massachusetts's largest counties.

Sales department operational objective: To increase delivery sales by 30%, by targeting 3 of Massachusetts's largest counties.

Production Process

After you create your objectives, you have to think strategically on how you're going to meet them. In order to do this, each department (or team) needs to have all the necessary resources for the production process.

Resources you should think about include the following:

• Suppliers – do you have a supplier (or more) to help you produce your product?
• Technology team: app developing software
• Marketing team: software licenses for website analytical tools
• Sales team: headsets, phone systems or virtual phone system technology
• Cost – what is the budget for each department?

In addition to the production process, you'll also need to describe in detail your operating process. This will demonstrate to investors that you know exactly how you want your business to run on a day-to-day basis.

Items to address include:

• Location – where are employees working? Will you need additional facilities?
• Work hours – will employees have a set schedule or flexible work schedule?
• Personnel – who is in charge of making sure department tasks are completed?

Creating a timeline with milestones is important for your new business. It keeps everyone focused and is a good tracking method for efficiency. For instance, if milestones aren’t being met, you'll know that it's time to re-evaluate your production process or consider new hires.

Below are common milestones new businesses should plan for.

When you completed your Management Plan Worksheet in the previous course, you jotted down which key hires you needed right away and which could wait. Make sure you have a good idea on when you would like those key hires to happen; whether it’s after your company hits a certain revenue amount or once a certain project takes off.

Production Milestones

Production milestones keep business on track. These milestones act as "checkpoints" for your overall department objectives. For instance, if you want to create a new app by the end of the year, product milestones you outline might include a beta roll out, testing, and various version releases.

Other product milestones to keep in mind:

• Design phase
• Product prototype phase
• Product launch
• Version release

Market Milestones

Market milestones are important for tracking efficiency and understanding whether your operations plan is working. For instance, a possible market milestone could be reaching a certain amount of clients or customers after a new product or service is released.

A few other market milestones to consider:

• Gain a certain amount of users/clients by a certain time
• Signing partnerships
• Running a competitive analysis
• Performing a price change evaluation

Financial Milestones

Financial milestones are important for tracking business performance. It's likely that a board of directors or investors will work with you on creating financial milestones. In addition, in startups, it's common that financial milestones are calculated for 12 months.

Typical financial milestones include:

• Funding events
• Revenue and profit goals
• Transaction goals

In summary, your operations plan gives you the chance to show investors you know how you want your business to run. You know who you want to hire, where you want to work, and when you expect projects to be completed.

Download the attached worksheet and start putting your timelines and milestones together on paper.

Talk about this lesson

How To Write A Business Plan (2024 Guide)

Updated: Aug 20, 2022, 2:21am

Table of Contents

Brainstorm an executive summary, create a company description, brainstorm your business goals, describe your services or products, conduct market research, create financial plans, bottom line, frequently asked questions.

Every business starts with a vision, which is distilled and communicated through a business plan. In addition to your high-level hopes and dreams, a strong business plan outlines short-term and long-term goals, budget and whatever else you might need to get started. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to write a business plan that you can stick to and help guide your operations as you get started.

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Drafting the Summary

An executive summary is an extremely important first step in your business. You have to be able to put the basic facts of your business in an elevator pitch-style sentence to grab investors’ attention and keep their interest. This should communicate your business’s name, what the products or services you’re selling are and what marketplace you’re entering.

Ask for Help

When drafting the executive summary, you should have a few different options. Enlist a few thought partners to review your executive summary possibilities to determine which one is best.

After you have the executive summary in place, you can work on the company description, which contains more specific information. In the description, you’ll need to include your business’s registered name , your business address and any key employees involved in the business. 

The business description should also include the structure of your business, such as sole proprietorship , limited liability company (LLC) , partnership or corporation. This is the time to specify how much of an ownership stake everyone has in the company. Finally, include a section that outlines the history of the company and how it has evolved over time.

Wherever you are on the business journey, you return to your goals and assess where you are in meeting your in-progress targets and setting new goals to work toward.

Numbers-based Goals

Goals can cover a variety of sections of your business. Financial and profit goals are a given for when you’re establishing your business, but there are other goals to take into account as well with regard to brand awareness and growth. For example, you might want to hit a certain number of followers across social channels or raise your engagement rates.

Another goal could be to attract new investors or find grants if you’re a nonprofit business. If you’re looking to grow, you’ll want to set revenue targets to make that happen as well.

Intangible Goals

Goals unrelated to traceable numbers are important as well. These can include seeing your business’s advertisement reach the general public or receiving a terrific client review. These goals are important for the direction you take your business and the direction you want it to go in the future.

The business plan should have a section that explains the services or products that you’re offering. This is the part where you can also describe how they fit in the current market or are providing something necessary or entirely new. If you have any patents or trademarks, this is where you can include those too.

If you have any visual aids, they should be included here as well. This would also be a good place to include pricing strategy and explain your materials.

This is the part of the business plan where you can explain your expertise and different approach in greater depth. Show how what you’re offering is vital to the market and fills an important gap.

You can also situate your business in your industry and compare it to other ones and how you have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Other than financial goals, you want to have a budget and set your planned weekly, monthly and annual spending. There are several different costs to consider, such as operational costs.

Business Operations Costs

Rent for your business is the first big cost to factor into your budget. If your business is remote, the cost that replaces rent will be the software that maintains your virtual operations.

Marketing and sales costs should be next on your list. Devoting money to making sure people know about your business is as important as making sure it functions.

Other Costs

Although you can’t anticipate disasters, there are likely to be unanticipated costs that come up at some point in your business’s existence. It’s important to factor these possible costs into your financial plans so you’re not caught totally unaware.

Business plans are important for businesses of all sizes so that you can define where your business is and where you want it to go. Growing your business requires a vision, and giving yourself a roadmap in the form of a business plan will set you up for success.

How do I write a simple business plan?

When you’re working on a business plan, make sure you have as much information as possible so that you can simplify it to the most relevant information. A simple business plan still needs all of the parts included in this article, but you can be very clear and direct.

What are some common mistakes in a business plan?

The most common mistakes in a business plan are common writing issues like grammar errors or misspellings. It’s important to be clear in your sentence structure and proofread your business plan before sending it to any investors or partners.

What basic items should be included in a business plan?

When writing out a business plan, you want to make sure that you cover everything related to your concept for the business,  an analysis of the industry―including potential customers and an overview of the market for your goods or services―how you plan to execute your vision for the business, how you plan to grow the business if it becomes successful and all financial data around the business, including current cash on hand, potential investors and budget plans for the next few years.

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Julia is a writer in New York and started covering tech and business during the pandemic. She also covers books and the publishing industry.

Kelly Main is staff writer at Forbes Advisor, specializing in testing and reviewing marketing software with a focus on CRM solutions, payment processing solutions, and web design software. Before joining the team, she was a content producer at Fit Small Business where she served as an editor and strategist covering small business marketing content. She is a former Google Tech Entrepreneur and holds an MSc in international marketing from Edinburgh Napier University. Additionally, she is a Columnist at Inc. Magazine and the founder of ProsperBull, a financial literacy program taught in U.S. high schools.

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What Is Operational Planning? How to Write an Operational Plan?

FEB.15, 2024

What Is a Business Operational Plan?

Operational planning converts strategic goals and objectives into tangible, actionable tactics. An operational plan outlines the specific day-to-day activities and tactics required to align with an organization’s broader strategy and vision. An operational roadmap guides how a business will implement its strategy through specific programs, budgets, procedures, and processes.

An operational plan is typically prepared for a 1-3 year timeframe and includes detailed action plans for each department or function. It describes the resources needed, tasks and activities to be done, deadlines, and who is in charge. The short-term execution of the strategic plan in the focus.

Examples of Operational Planning in Management

Some common operational planning examples in management are:

• Production planning
• Inventory management
• Workforce planning
• Facilities management
• Logistics and distribution
• Service operations
• Maintenance planning
• OPS planning
• Contingency planning

The overall operational plan integrates these different functional plans to ensure alignment toward common business objectives. It is updated periodically by an operational planner to keep pace with changing internal and external conditions.

Who Performs Operational Planning?

Operational planning involves collaboration across various levels within an organization:

1. Managers and Department Heads

Role: Managers and department heads play a central role in the plan of operation. Their expertise guides the process, and they ensure that the plan aligns with the overall strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Ensure that operational goals are consistent with the organization’s strategic vision.
• Allocate financial, human, and material resources based on strategic priorities.
• Assign specific responsibilities to team members.
• Track progress and make adjustments as needed.

2. Cross-Functional Teams

Role: Operational planning requires input from different functional areas—finance, marketing, production, logistics, etc.

• Teams collaborate to create a comprehensive plan.
• Each team brings specialized knowledge to the table.
• Ensure that departmental plans align seamlessly across functions.

3. Individual Contributors

Role: While managers and teams drive the process, individual contributors also play a vital role.

• Implement the operational plan on a day-to-day basis.
• Provide valuable feedback based on their frontline experience.
• Adapt to changing circumstances and contribute to continuous improvement.

4. Top Leadership (CEO, Board of Directors)

Role: Although not directly involved in the nitty-gritty of operational planning, top leadership sets the overall tone.

• Define the overarching vision and long-term goals.
• Ensure that operational plans align with the organization’s mission.
• Approve major resource allocations and strategic & operational initiatives .

Strategic Planning vs Operational Planning

LendingTree research revealed that many businesses struggle to survive in the long term. Among private sector businesses in the United States, approximately 20.8% experience failure within the initial year, while 48.4% face challenges within the first five years. The numbers escalate further, with 65.1% encountering difficulties within the initial decade. A significant contributing factor to this elevated failure rate is the absence of efficient operational practices.

Operations are influenced by two essential yet distinct types of organizational planning: strategic planning and operational planning. While they are complementary and interlinked, let’s start with understanding what is strategic planning and operational planning before understanding the key differences:

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is all about defining the core purpose and vision for an organization. It involves looking ahead 3-5 years to set broad goals and priorities across the business. The aim is to determine the path ahead – where we want to go, what we want to achieve, and how we’ll stay competitive.

Some key questions strategic planning tries to answer:

• What’s our raison d’être as a company – why are we here?
• What’s the dream for our future – where do we envision ourselves in 3-5 years?
• What high-level accomplishments do we want to target over that timeframe?
• How will we maintain an edge over competitors in our industry?

The strategic plan sets the long-term targets and big goals that show what we want to become in the future.

Operational Planning

While strategic planning focuses on the “what,” operational planning focuses on the “how.” Operational plans detail the concrete strategies, initiatives, resources, processes, and actions required over a 1-3 year timeframe to deliver on the goals outlined in the strategic plan. Operational plans answer questions such as:

• How will we organize resources to deliver on strategy?
• What specific actions, projects, tactics, and steps must each department undertake?
• What budgets, systems, processes, and timelines are needed?
• Who will be responsible for each element?

Operational planning deals with the short-term, practical planning and implementation required to turn the strategic vision into reality through day-to-day operations.

The key differences between operational vs. strategic planning are summarized in the table below:

Remember, while strategic planning provides the big picture, operational planning ensures that the organization’s wheels keep turning smoothly. Both are essential for sustained success.

Operational Planning Process

The operational planning process is the sequence of steps that are followed to create, implement, and evaluate an operational plan. Here are the primary steps in operational planning:

Step 1: Develop a Strategic Plan

• Define vision, mission, goals, and objectives
• Identify key stakeholders, resources, risks, and opportunities
• Align with organizational values and culture
• Use tools like SWOT analysis, SMART goals, and balanced scorecard
• Set a time frame of 1-3 years

Step 2: Prioritize Your Goals

• Identify and prioritize the most important and urgent goals for the short-term
• Align them with your strategic plan and make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound
• Use tools like the Eisenhower matrix, MoSCoW method, or Pareto principle

Step 3: Use Leading Indicators

• Choose measurable factors that indicate progress and performance
• Track and evaluate the effectiveness of strategies and actions
• Examples: customer satisfaction, employee engagement, quality, productivity, revenue, etc.

Step 4: Draw on Your Organization

• Identify people, departments, teams, and processes involved in the execution
• Assign roles and responsibilities, define expectations and standards
• Establish communication and collaboration channels
• Use tools like the RACI matrix, Gantt chart, or resource allocation matrix

Step 5: Communicate Your Plan

• Share the operational plan with stakeholders, employees, customers, and partners
• Explain the purpose, benefits, and challenges of the plan
• Solicit feedback and suggestions, address concerns or issues
• Keep everyone informed and updated on the status and results
• Use tools like newsletters, presentations, meetings, or surveys

Step 6: Monitor and Evaluate

• Use leading indicators and other tools to measure outcomes and impacts
• Compare actual results with expected results, identify gaps or deviations
• Analyze root causes and effects of gaps, determine corrective actions or improvements

Step 7: Review and Revise

• Regularly review the operational plan and assess relevance and alignment with the strategic plan
• Make adjustments or changes as necessary, based on feedback, data, and lessons learned

An operation plan in a business plan covers aspects such as production, facilities, technology, resources, and market requirements. Here are some common components of an operational plan:

• Executive summary – A brief overview of your operational plan and its main points and purpose.
• Operational budget – A financial plan that estimates the income and expenses of your business operations.
• Operational objectives – The specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals that you want to accomplish through your business operations.
• Processes and workflows – The steps and procedures that you and your team will follow to create and deliver your products or services.
• Operational timeline – A schedule that outlines the milestones and deadlines for your operational objectives and projects.

Benefits of Operational Planning

Good operations planning is really important for companies to meet their big picture goals. By thoughtfully designing, syncing up, and managing the everyday work needed to run a business, operations planning gives some key benefits:

• Provides a clear direction and guidance for the team members, and defines their roles and responsibilities.
• Helps to monitor the progress and performance of the team, and to identify and resolve any issues or challenges that may arise.
• Enables the team to adapt to changing circumstances and to respond to new opportunities or threats.
• Improves the communication and collaboration among the team members and other stakeholders.
• Increases the productivity and quality of the work, and enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty.

At OGSCapital, we have a team of expert business plan writers and consultants who can provide operational and strategic planning services . Our high-quality and customized business plans have helped thousands of clients in different industries raise billions of dollars. We can help you create a realistic and achievable operational plan to guide your daily operations and decision-making. We also offer full customization, revisions as needed, and strategic advice for your operational plan. Contact us today to help you take your operations to the next level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What are the disadvantages of operational planning?

Some disadvantages of operational planning are:

• Multi-level dependency , which means that the success of the operational plan relies on the coordination and collaboration of different components of the organization; 
• Human error , which means that mistakes can occur during the execution or evaluation of the operational plan; and 
• Loss of creativity , which means that the operational plan can inhibit innovation and adaptation to changing conditions.

Q. What is a good operational plan?

A good operational plan should be clear and precise that helps in preparing strategies and directs the day-to-day operations and choices of a business or organization. It explains what the business or organization wants to do, how it will do it, what it will need, how it will measure its progress, and what results it expects.

OGSCapital’s team has assisted thousands of entrepreneurs with top-rate business plan development, consultancy and analysis. They’ve helped thousands of SME owners secure more than $1.5 billion in funding, and they can do the same for you.

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What is an Operational Plan? A Complete Playbook (+ Examples, Tips & More)

Introduction.

Without a plan, your business operations are as good as a children’s playground—everyone’s doing their own thing with no care in the world. 

An operational plan brings order to your organization. It defines the functional aspects of your long-term strategy, like goals, milestones, responsibilities and timelines, to build collaboration and make real progress toward your vision. 

Teams often overlook the importance of operational plan management, leading to miscommunication, unnecessary roadblocks and slow growth. 

If you don't want to end up in a chaotic playground with everything going south, read this start-to-finish guide on operational planning. We'll share a 6-step process of making your own operational plan with a few examples to inspire you.

TL;DR: What is an operational plan?

• An operational plan clarifies the details of your strategy, assigns responsibilities, and sets milestones and timelines.
• Use an operational plan to create a roadmap, assign roles, track progress, establish criteria for success, and minimize errors.
• To develop an operational plan, create a fail-proof strategic plan, establish clear goals and budgets, define the project scope, create the operational plan, get stakeholders' buy-in, and publish the plan using the right tool.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan is a roadmap designed to implement your business strategies. It operationalizes your strategic plan by defining:

• Vision and objectives behind a strategy.
• Budget and resources required for execution.
• Weekly, monthly and quarterly milestones. 
• Relevant metrics to track progress consistently. 

‎An operational plan clarifies all the finer details about your strategy—like what, who, when and how—to help you realize the bigger vision. It’s a work plan for transferring the available inputs into the desired outputs. 

Operational planning vs. strategic planning

While operational and strategic planning might sound the same, they have significantly different meanings. Let's take a quick look at these differences to understand what an operational plan stacks up against a strategic plan.

5 reasons why you need an operational plan

Only setting goals without a solid operational plan to implement them is like making new year’s resolutions that never come true. 

Without a clear direction of what to do and how, you’d end up wasting your resources with little to no progress to show for it. An operational plan helps move the needle for your company by clarifying the steps to success and bringing more accountability. 

Still wondering how an operational plan can keep you on track? These five benefits will clue you in:

1. Creating an airtight roadmap

If a strategic plan defines the destination, an operational plan chalks out the itinerary to reach that destination. This actionable roadmap covers all bases to streamline collaboration within the team and set up the right systems to hit your milestones. 

2. Attributing roles to all stakeholders

Making an operational plan allows you to assign responsibilities to all internal and external stakeholders. It clarifies who’s responsible for what and sets expectations from the start. This is key for bringing everyone on the same page and avoiding roadblocks once the work is underway. 

3. Tracking progress & making strategic changes

Timelines and milestones are two of the most crucial components of an operational plan in business. They empower teams to analyze their performance and review progress objectively. You can use these insights to tweak your game plan for greater success and to improve operational efficiency .

4. Establishing criteria & metrics for success 

An operational plan outlines the parameters for success and metrics to monitor the same. These metrics give you a clear picture of your progress at every stage to ensure you’re moving as per the plan. They also highlight any potential red flags that can potentially derail the plan and need your attention. 

5. Minimizing discrepancies & errors

One of the most important benefits of making an operational plan is the clarity it brings to everyone. Instead of leaving your team clueless about the next steps, this work plan clarifies how and where they can start. It also reduces errors by laying down the ground rules for every task and process.

📌 ‎ Related resource: Operations Teams: How to Assemble and Lead a High-Performing Team

How to develop an operational plan strategy

There’s no standard rulebook for creating an operational plan. It’s a fully customizable document that depends entirely on your company’s goals, resources, timelines and overall approach. 

For example, a fast-paced team can work with shorter timelines and hit more goals than a large-scale organization with more levels of checks and a bigger hierarchy.  

So, instead of replicating other companies’ operational plans, let’s help you create your own plan with this 6-step process:

• Draw out a fail-proof strategic plan.
• Establish clear goals and budgets.
• Dig deeper into the project scope.
• Create your operational plan.
• Get all stakeholders’ buy-in for the plan.
• Publish the plan using the right tool.

1. Draw out a fail-proof strategic plan

A strategic plan is to an operational plan what a storyline is to a movie—it conveys the essence and creates a direction for the operational plan to become a masterpiece. 

So, naturally, the first step to operational planning is creating a strategic plan; here’s how:

• Define what success looks like for the entire organization. 
• Evaluate organizational readiness to implement this strategy. 
• Take inputs from people in the senior leadership. 
• Assign responsibilities to different stakeholders. 
• Prioritize goals against timelines. 

Once done, you can rely on this strategic plan throughout the operational planning process to prepare for what lies ahead. 

💡 ‎Use these 14 free customizable project plan templates to enhance communication, save time and achieve your strategic planning goals.

2. Establish clear goals & budgets

The next step is breaking your high-level goals into shorter, more actionable objectives. For example, you can divide the goal of achieving an X% growth in revenue into smaller targets, like increasing inbound leads, doubling down on cold outreach and rolling out a referral program. Implementing effective referral tracking within the program will allow you to monitor and optimize the success of your referral initiatives, providing valuable insights into the sources and impact of referred business.

Goal-setting makes your operational plan realistic and feasible. You're ideating the means to realize the long-term vision by hitting the right milestones. 

More importantly, once you have a list of goals, it's easier to determine the budget and resources required to achieve them. Before moving ahead, do your homework to set a solid budget that allows you to implement your strategy without splurging too much. 

3. Dig deeper into the project scope

Once you’re clear about your goals and resources, it’s time to define the finer details of your plan—specifying who’ll do what, when and how. 

Create a comprehensive project scope by outlining:

• Department-wise goals and tasks according to the goals.
• Different stakeholders involved within and outside your company. 
• Responsibilities for each stakeholder with primary KPIs for their role.
• SOPs  and  workflows  to perform a task or complete a process. 

This step brings more specificity to your operational plan. It concretely spells out each goal with details about milestones within each goal, roles and teams responsible for fulfilling these milestones and how they will work toward the end goals. 

💡 ‎ Scribe top tip: Creating a project scope document is a breeze when you use Scribe. You can use Scribe's project scope template to get cracking at the earliest. 

4. Create your operational plan

By this point, you've done all the legwork to get to work and start writing your operational plan finally.

Make it as actionable and value-packed as possible by answering these five main questions:

• Who: People involved in different tasks. Include a list of teams and specific roles involved in the business operations and clarify what’s expected of them. 
• What: Plan of action and targets to pursue. Create a milestone-based roadmap of the high-level goals to achieve and the smaller goals involved in the process. 
• Where: Platform(s) where daily operations will happen. Add all the tools and frameworks you'll use to run business operations through this plan seamlessly. 
• When: Deadlines for different tasks and activities. Map out the timelines for each job to ensure your team is on track for timely completion. 
• ‍ How much: Costs involved in hitting the designated goals. Mention your final budget and resource allocation for different tasks.

Use Scribe's free AI Writer for Operations tool to capture and document operational procedures.

‎Additionally, a good operational plan also lists the metrics to track your progress. Pick and explain relevant metrics in your plan to show employees how you'll analyze their efforts.  ‍

5. Get all stakeholders’ buy-in for the plan

No plan is perfect and there's always scope for improving your operational plan to make it perfect. So, once you've drafted the plan, don't forget to run it by a few select stakeholders to identify the gaps you can cover. 

Actively seek feedback from people in different ranks and departments to understand the missing links in your plan. Your plan will go through 2-3 rounds of iterations before it’s finally ready to roll out. 

6. Publish the plan using the right tool

The final step in the process is publishing the plan. The most important thing to remember is that your plan should be:

• Reader-friendly.
• Easily accessible.
• Quickly shareable. 

Clueless about the best way to hit all three points to roll out your operational plan? We have just the solution you need — Scribe . 

‎Scribe is a documentation tool designed to create intuitive documents, like an operational plan, in a few seconds. It significantly reduces the time spent on creating such documents and improves team efficiency in more ways than one.

‎You can create a single Scribe to explain a process or compile instructions with SOPs in a single place with Pages. You can even ask the AI to write your operational plan — just add a simple prompt and your Scribes, and the AI will build a customized document!

‎It's the easiest way to bring your team on the same page and power up your operations! 

✨ ‎See how operations teams use Scribe to tackle even the most daunting operational challenges.

3 operational plan examples (& why they work)

If you’re looking for some inspiration to get cracking with your planning process, looking at a few operations plan examples can help big time! Let’s look at three great examples, see why they work and how you can replicate the results. 

1. Carter Supply’s risk management plan

This detailed risk management plan by Carter Supply covers several aspects of managing risk at the organization. This 10-page document lists the key components of this plan, like a summary, the approval process and the end-to-end risk management process. 

As an operational plan, it gives the entire team clear insights into the risk management plan, highlights why it’s in place and explains how this plan will be used. 

This plan also covers different aspects of the plan and lays down the process of working on each element. For example, for risk quantification, the plan specifies that the risk manager will work with the risk owner to understand the exposure. 

2. Upscope’s go-to-market plan

Upscope ’s go-to-market (GTM) plan is another excellent example of operational planning. The SaaS company created this plan to execute its strategy for breaking into the co-browsing market. 

Pursuing this goal, the team created an airtight plan with a rundown of its target audience, pain points the product solves and the buyer journey. 

The Upscope marketing and sales teams could use this GTM plan to launch targeted campaigns and reach the right people. They were also well aware of the main value propositions to share with the target buyers, nudging them towards a purchase. 

📌 ‎Related resource: How Product Operations Can Help Your Team Build Better Products 📌 ‎

3. SmartNet’s project quality management plan

The quality management plan by SmartNet is a detailed document explaining the company’s entire operations framework, from the management structure to project reporting, risk assessment, deliverable production and more. 

Instead of a single department, this operational plan documents the complete business operations. Despite being so lengthy, the document is easy to read and understand—exactly how the plan should look like.

It also includes all the critical information to guide new employees about the company's operations from scratch.

Make operational planning your road to success 

When done right, operational planning can be a game-changer for streamlining your operations. It’s an in-depth roadmap to work toward your vision and hit all goals. 

Even though making an operational plan isn’t the most exciting task and it can get extremely time-consuming, the right process and tools can do the trick for you. Follow the six steps we’ve highlighted in this guide and when you’re ready to roll, use Scribe to put the plan in place. 

Scribe takes the pain out of documentation to empower teams for seamless operational planning. Try it today to see how it works!

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How to Write the Operations Section of Your Business Plan

2 min. read

Updated January 3, 2024

The operations plan covers what makes your business run. It explains the day-to-day workflows for your business and how you will deliver the product or service that you offer. As part of your plan, it’s your chance to describe what you’ve set up so far and that you understand what is still left to make your business fully operational.

• How to write about business operations

Like some of the other sections in your plan, the information you include fully depends on your type of business. If you run a subscription box service you’ll need to cover how you source and fulfill each order. If it’s a service-oriented business (like a mechanic or coffee shop) you’ll need to go into more detail about your location as well as the tools and technology you use.

The important thing is that the information here fully addresses how your business runs.

What to include in your operations plan

The components of your operations plan fully depend on what’s necessary to produce your product or service. For most, you’ll be adding details about your location and facilities, the technology being used, and any equipment or tools.

Location and facilities

The information you include about your business location fully depends on the state, city, and neighborhood you’ve chosen. This will determine the specific taxes, registration, licenses, permits, zoning laws, and other regulations you’ll be subjected to.

Once you’ve legally established your business be sure to reference the relevant paperwork and legal documentation in this section. You may also want to point to mockups of the building, copies of legal agreements, and any other supporting documentation for how valuable the property is and how it helps your business function.

Sourcing and fulfillment

How will you create your product/service and what will it cost? You’ll include detailed breakdowns in your financial plan, but here you’ll talk about what it will take, who you will work with, and any alternatives.

How and when to write about technology

Is your product or service driven by a specific technology or process? Let investors, banks, or other necessary parties know why it’s a valuable part of your business.

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• Why you need an operational plan

Understanding your business operations makes your processes real. It ensures that you have organized steps in place to produce a product or service.

For investors, this helps prove that you know what you’re doing and can back up the rest of your plan with actual work that makes it happen. For you as a business owner, it’s a starting point for optimization. You have a blueprint for how things work. And as you run your business, can begin to identify opportunities for improvement.

If you don’t cover operations as part of your business plan, then you’re flying blindly. There’s no documented process for how things should work and no connection to the other strategic elements of your business.

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Kody Wirth is a content writer and SEO specialist for Palo Alto Software—the creator's of Bplans and LivePlan. He has 3+ years experience covering small business topics and runs a part-time content writing service in his spare time.

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What Is the Operational Plan Section of the Business Plan?

Learning what an operation plan is and learning how to make it is something critical to any business. 3 min read updated on February 01, 2023

An operation plan section of the business plan is an essential part of any business. Learning what an operation plan is and learning how to make it is something critical to any business. Here are the main things you need to know about an operation plan.

Definition of an Operation Plan

An operation plan is a guiding path for the business to follow in order to achieve all of its goals and objectives described in the general business plan.

The operation plan mainly includes details about the people responsible for completing the required actions, and all the costs and KPIs (key performance indicators) for these actions to be accomplished.

In order for any business to be stable in the long run, the operation plan must be updated regularly in order to ensure the stability of the business.

What Is the Operations Plan Section and How to Properly Make It

The section of the operations plan which is included in the business plan mainly specifies all the physical requirements for the operation of the business. These physical requirements mainly include equipment, facilities, and location.

In order to make a complete business plan , three things need to be clarified to the reader:

• Everything was done for the business from the start to reach its current position
• Acknowledgment that you know exactly what should be done for any business to get off the ground
• Full awareness and understanding of the delivering and manufacturing processes of the service or the product you offer.

Operating Section of the Business Plan: Stage of Development Section

While you're developing the stage of development section, you should begin with the previous procedures that have been taken so far, along with mentioning what is best to be done in the future, it should be as follows:

• Production workflow : In this, you will describe in detail the exact steps of how your service or your product will be made, along with the acknowledgment of any possible problem that could be faced during the process.
• In addition, you will include details about how to train the employees to solve any upcoming problem and avoid any risks as much as possible. Along with mentioning any dangerous equipment that will be used, and the proper ways of using and storing these pieces of equipment.
• Supply chains: In this section you clarify the identity of the suppliers, the prices they offer, and their terms and conditions, In addition to providing the possible alternatives in case it doesn't work out with the current suppliers
• As an example, in case you are willing to have a specific quality control certificate, like the ISO 9000, you should identify and explain the required procedures.

What Are the Key Components to Include in an Operational Plan Regarding the Business Organization?

Here are the main components to be included in the operational plan:

• Most of the tasks in the operation plan are carried out by the company's managers and the employees under them, so it is essential that to clarify their identity, describe their qualifications, and describe the jobs and tasks which they will be responsible for.
• Providing an organizational chart to describe the structural hierarchy of the business.
• The philosophy and tactics of the company, and the role they play in the development and stability of the business.
• A statistical measurement of the performance of the employees and managers, and the ways of reward and punishment.
• Explain the methods that you will use to find the right employees, putting into consideration the required qualifications needed, the job description of each one, and the compensation rates that you will offer.
• In case the business will need any outside consultants it should be noted, along with the specific functions required from any outsider consultant or employee.

In the end, one could conclude that the success or a failure of a business depends heavily on the quality of the business and operation plan put forward.

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Operational Plan: Everything You Need To Know (2024 Guide)

The old way of planning no longer works in complex and unpredictable business environments, and companies are struggling to find their feet on shaky ground. As we’ve seen with many of our customers and strategies in Cascade, organizations can no longer count on executing three or even five-year strategic plans.

The new reality forces companies and their operations teams to adapt their operational plans more frequently and within shorter time frames if they want to reap benefits faster than their competitors. Organizations need to work on their strategic instinct and fast adaptability to enhance their operational efficiency .  

And that requires big changes—including building a flexible operational plan, supported by the right tools and systems that help you achieve real-time centralized observability and empower a strategic response to external disruptions.

Read this article to build a bulletproof operational plan that includes all the key elements necessary to overcome unpredictable business chaos. You’ll also get free templates that will help you rapidly adapt and align your teams.

✨Bonus: We’ve included pro tips from business leaders in our network to help you identify gaps in your strategy execution and build resilient business operations.

What Is An Operational Plan?

An operational plan is action and detail-oriented; it needs to focus on short-term strategy execution and outline an organization's day-to-day operations. If your operations strategy is a promise, your operational plan is the action plan for how you will deliver on it every day, week, and month.

Put simply, an operational plan helps you bridge the gap between business strategy and on-the-ground execution and ensures that the organization is on track to achieve its long-term goals.

Benefits of operational planning

• Clear definition of relationships between cross-functional teams in different departments and responsibilities for each to eliminate duplicated efforts.
• Tighter alignment between corporate or business unit strategic plans and on-the-ground execution, helping the organization meet its business targets.
• Strong operating system that enables the company to quickly adapt, deliver operations goals, and monitor performance.

Operational planning vs. strategic planning

Operational planning deals with the day-to-day details and short-term goals, while strategic planning focuses on the big picture and long-term direction of an organization.

To put it in simpler terms, operational planning is about the "how" of daily tasks, while strategic planning defines the "what" and "why" for future success.

📚Recommended reading: Strategic vs. Operational Planning

Kickstart Your Operational Planning Process: Lay The Foundation

The quality of your operational plan will depend on your input. A successful operational planning initiative will consider these aspects:

• Who will be involved? Identify and include employees, customers, and the management team in the planning process to gain valuable insights from the front lines, ensuring better strategy and execution buy-in.
• What are your internal capabilities? Assess internal capabilities by conducting an internal analysis , including resource requirements, operating budget, and talent skills. Talent management and employee engagement are just a few of the many challenges that COOs will have on their operations agenda.
• What environment are you operating in? Conduct an external analysis (e.g., PESTLE or Porter’s 5 Forces ) to inform your approach and identify optimization opportunities and risks, keeping you agile in a changing market.
• Is it aligned with your organization’s strategy? Ensure alignment of your operational plan with your organization’s strategic plan to actively support the company's long-term vision and contribute to key business metrics.

👉🏻 Once you’ve gathered this information, you can develop an operational plan to help you execute business strategies.

Key Elements Of Your Operational Plan

Enough chit-chat; it’s time to put your operational plan together. We've built this based on our proven and tested approach, used by over +45,000 Cascade users.

See how Cascade Strategy Execution Platform enhances operational efficiency by reducing duplication and aligning teams toward common goals. It effectively eliminates waste resulting from misalignment, fostering smoother operations and improved performance.

Here’s a recap of the five key elements your plan must consider:

Choose key metrics aligned with the company goals

Selecting your operational plan's key metrics isn't a mere exercise in tracking numbers; it's about laser-focused alignment with your business needs and objectives. These metrics are the tangible indicators of your organization's efficiency and performance. They serve as the compass, guiding your daily decisions and actions toward achieving concrete results.

By precisely aligning these metrics with your company's core objectives, you ensure that every initiative and action within your operational plan directly contributes to achieving tangible results.

An aligned operational plan makes it easier to:

• Communicate roles and responsibilities to all employees so they know how their efforts contribute to overall business success.
• Identify and address operational bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could derail strategy execution.
• Motivate and engage employees to work toward strategic objectives and deliver on business outcomes.

Remember that the role of operations is to close the gap between your organization's strategic goals and what is being done on a daily basis to make them happen.

👉🏻 How Cascade can help:

With Cascade’s Metrics Library , you can bring your operating and financial business-level goals together with your strategy under one single roof. This makes reporting & governance easy, accurate, and less time-consuming by connecting your business data to your key business initiatives.

Through Cascade’s integrations , you can consolidate your metrics in one place, importing your data directly from business systems, data lakes, BI tools, or even spreadsheets.

Define the focus areas of your operational plan

The focus areas of your operational plan are the key areas of the business that the plan will address.

This will depend on your business plan. Think about how the business operates and how it succeeds. Do you need to pursue short-term cost reductions while simultaneously pursuing longer-term growth and transformation initiatives? Your operational plans must be built on these strategic priorities.

For example, you can prioritize your focus areas based on the most relevant business strategies or by specific departments. Some examples of focus areas could be:

• Administration
• Human Resources

💡Tips to help define the focus areas of your operational plan:

• Identify the business's key challenges and opportunities.
• Consider the business's overall long-term strategy and key metrics and how the operational plan's focus areas can support these objectives.
• Bring other people on board to help you identify what needs to be addressed by the operations plan.

Create strategic objectives for your operational plan

Strategic objectives are specific goals aligned with the operation’s strategy and focus areas. They represent what you want to achieve in each focus area and will serve as the building blocks of your plan, ensuring that it’s focused and actionable.

Some examples of strategic objectives:

• Reduce costs by 10% within the next year by implementing more efficient processes and streamlining the supply chain over the next year.
• Launch three new products in the next fiscal year to expand your product lines and increase revenue.
• Increase customer satisfaction scores by 5% within the next six months.

💡Tips for defining strategic objectives include:

• Ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
• Consistently align objectives with your operational plan's focus areas and the company's goals.
• Don’t be afraid to get input from other people about your objectives.

Identify and prioritize projects

It’s time to identify and prioritize the projects that need to be executed. Remember, projects are action plans to help you achieve your strategic objectives.

Project planning should include thinking about time frames, task assignments, and deliverables (and prioritizing).

Here are some examples of project ideas:

• Localize sourcing for critical semi-finished materials.
• Streamline the supply chain to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Find and develop an alternative logistics channel.
• Implement a new customer service training program to improve customer satisfaction scores.
• Implement a new technology that will enable end-to-end supply chain visibility.

💡Tips for defining and prioritizing projects:

• Identify the specific actions and activities needed to achieve each strategic objective.
• Prioritize the projects based on their importance, feasibility, and potential impact on the business.
• Involve stakeholders in defining and prioritizing the projects to ensure their needs and concerns are heard.

Identify and track key performance indicators (KPIs)

Finally, you’ll need to know if your operational plan and day-to-day activities result in outcomes.

Set KPIs for key initiatives and strategic objectives to measure success, ensure alignment, and identify performance gaps in your operational plan.

Some examples of operations KPIs are:

• Inventory costs
• Costs of goods sold
• Revenue growth
• Employee retention rate
• Customer satisfaction score

💡Tips for defining and tracking KPIs:

• Align KPIs with your strategic objectives and focus areas so that you can track the plan's progress against these specific goals.
• Add both lagging and leading indicators .
• Instead of using multiple disconnected spreadsheets and project management tools, consider live dashboards or reporting systems to track the KPIs and monitor progress over time.

👉🏻 How Cascade can help build your plan:

Cascade’s planner feature enables you to build your operational plan with structure and ease by breaking down the complexity from high-level initiatives to executable outcomes. Define your key elements (focus areas, objectives, projects, and KPIs), and share the plan with your teams. You’ll get full visibility of the plan’s progress in real-time, allowing you to identify gaps, quickly update the plan, and communicate the change with your team with a single click.

👉🏻 If you don’t want to start building the plan from scratch, use our free Operational Plan Template pre-filled with examples of focus areas, objectives, projects, and KPIs that you can customize to meet your organization’s needs.

Operational Plan Examples & Templates

Here are five operational plan examples to help you create plans for your teams. You can use one master operational plan or set up an operational plan for each department.

Master Operational Plan Example

This Operational Plan Template will help you close the gap between business goals and day-to-day operations. You'll be able to set goals and KPIs for your top priorities and work with the operations team to deliver operational excellence and business results.

HR Plan Example

This HR Operational Plan Template can be used to meet staffing requirements, manage human capital and align human resources activities with your strategy. HR managers in any industry can create a clear operational plan that can be constantly monitored, adapted, and improved.

IT Plan Example

If you’re in the IT team, try out this IT Plan Template to get your IT operational planning up and running fast. It comes prefilled with focus areas and KPIs relevant to IT operations; you can easily customize workflows and deliverables to your needs.

Marketing Plan Example

This Marketing Plan Template can help you efficiently understand and plan your digital marketing operations using best practices. Use it to quickly set up priorities and get your social media and marketing teams moving on tasks that will make an impact.

Finance Plan Example

This finance-focused template is ideal if you want to get on top of your finance operations plan. Use it to allocate and distribute financial resources across your organization and get real-time updates through your dashboard and reports—which are great tools to create a visually compelling financial summary that clearly shows your key metrics.

💡Pro Tip: To ensure successful execution, it's crucial to align not just your master operational plan with your overarching strategic plan, but also all the operational department plans.

With the Alignment Maps feature, you’ll be able to visualize how your top-level business strategy breaks down into functional and operational plans. This empowers COOs and CFOs to consolidate their operational plans in one place, creating tighter alignment between the finance and operations teams and improving cross-collaboration to build more resilient operations.

Want to dig deeper? Use the Relationships feature to see the relationships between connected objectives from your plans and understand how your different department goals contribute to the core business metrics and goals. This view will allow you to clearly map dependencies, blockers, and risks that may lie along your journey.

5 Tips For An Effective Operational Plan And Its Execution

1. don’t underestimate the power of transparent communication.

Regularly communicate the operational plan and progress to all relevant stakeholders to build the necessary buy-in and support. Your employees must know your goals and the roadmap, and team members should understand their role in its execution. This business transparency will help everyone row in the same direction.

“Clarity regarding strategy is one of the key drivers of autonomous execution. If people understand what you’re working toward and have guardrails in place, they can be empowered to make their own decisions and don’t need everything to be ‘run up the chain’ to get approved. This allows you to move fast and at scale.” — Sam Sterling , Chief Strategy Officer, Akqa

2. Keep moving forward and adopt a growth mindset

Keep the momentum going and ensure that the plan is executed effectively. Regular monitoring and reviews can help identify and address any challenges or obstacles that may arise.

Schedule regular reviews and check-ins and provide the necessary support to ensure projects are on track and moving forward.

“I think adopting a growth mindset is super important. This means having the confidence to fail fast, try something new and empower people to do that.” — Ken Miller , General Manager, Azure Intelligent Cloud at Microsoft

With the Team Updates functionality, every team member can post updates on key measures, actions, and objectives. This will give you real-time visibility into performance and help you identify possible risks before it’s too late—without having to schedule extra meetings or nag your team members for updates.

3. Make strategic moves and change fast when you need to

Your operational plan should be flexible, adaptable, and open to adjustments. This means keeping an eye on progress, making corrections if needed, and being willing to adapt the plan to changing circumstances or new opportunities. As McKinsey suggests, you can consider creating a team that will be able to collect data, link analysis with action, and offer quick responses to rapid changes.

“Traditionally, companies would have taken that piece of paper and gone out and said: we're going to execute it, start to finish. Then get into the formulation of the strategy, what we need to hit, and what the end product result will be like. But what we do know is that’s never the case. Along the way, you're going to have bumps, and inevitably, you’ll need to change from that original picture.” — Annie Lucchitti , Marketing Manager, Unilever

4. Empower your operations team and boost efficiency

Effective operational planning requires the engagement and empowerment of your team. Involve stakeholders in the planning process and provide them with the necessary resources. Give them context and an opportunity to set goals and prioritize initiatives. This will help you boost engagement and hold them accountable for progress.

“I think it just works at every single level. Are people allowed to be themselves at work? Personally, are they at peace? Are they happy? Productivity happens when people have the right skills, but also when they are engaged and happy. If one of those fails a bit, productivity will start decreasing.” — Joan Torrents , Global Sourcing Manager, TESCO.

5. If it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed

Don’t underestimate the importance of tracking and measuring progress against the operational plan's goals and objectives. Set milestones, enforce KPIs, and stay on top of progress. Doing this will help you stay on course, empower you to act quickly, and provide valuable insights into what is going wrong.

“Data is a foundational element in the strategy definition phase as well as in the strategy execution phase as it helps create a baseline, identify key priorities, set goals, and measure progress.” — Erica Santoni , Principal, Diversity Equity & Inclusion, Intuit

Use Cascade’s Dashboards to monitor your day-to-day progress on key metrics and critical business and strategic information in real-time.

Compile the information in powerful reports and executive summaries in seconds with pre-built templates. Share them with your key stakeholders —internal and external— and invite them to collaborate on your strategy together.

Execute Your Operational Plan With Cascade 🚀

What good is an operational plan if no one executes it? If your organization wants to operate at a higher level, static tools like Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, Google Docs, and/or project management tools aren’t the solution.

❌They aren’t designed for adaptive strategy and planning.

❌They often lead to siloing and hinder effective cross-collaboration.

❌They make it challenging to measure progress and slow down decision-making.

With Cascade as your central operating system, you can stop running business operations blindfolded and embrace rapid, coordinated, and data-driven decision-making.

Get your Operational Plan Template to get started with a dynamic plan that will lead to actual outcomes for your business and see faster results from your strategy.

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Operational Planning: How to Make an Operations Plan

The operations of your business can be defined as the sum of all the daily activities that you and your team execute to create products or services and engage with your customers, among other critical business functions. While organizing these moving parts might sound difficult, it can be easily done by writing a business operational plan. But before we learn how to make one, let’s first understand what’s the relationship between strategic and operational planning.

Operational Planning vs. Strategic Planning

Operational planning and strategic planning are complementary to each other. This is because strategic plans define the business strategy and the long-term goals for your organization, while operational plans define the steps required to achieve them.

What Is a Strategic Plan?

A strategic plan is a business document that describes the business goals of a company as well as the high-level actions that will be taken to achieve them over a time period of 1-3 years.

What Is an Operational Plan?

Operational plans map the daily, weekly or monthly business operations that’ll be executed by the department to complete the goals you’ve previously defined in your strategic plan. Operational plans go deeper into explaining your business operations as they explain roles and responsibilities, timelines and the scope of work.

Operational plans work best when an entire department buys in, assigning due dates for tasks, measuring goals for success, reporting on issues and collaborating effectively. They work even better when there’s a platform like ProjectManager , which facilitates communication across departments to ensure that the machine is running smoothly as each team reaches its benchmark. Get started with ProjectManager for free today.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of turning strategic plans into action plans, which simply means breaking down high-level strategic goals and activities into smaller, actionable steps. The main goal of operational planning is to coordinate different departments and layers of management to ensure the whole organization works towards the same objective, which is achieving the goals set forth in the strategic plan .

How to Make an Operational Plan

There’s no single approach to follow when making an operation plan for your business. However, there’s one golden rule in operations management : your strategic and operational plans must be aligned. Based on that principle, here are seven steps to make an operational plan.

• Map business processes and workflows: What steps need to be taken at the operations level to accomplish long-term strategic goals?
• Set operational-level goals: Describe what operational-level goals contribute to the achievement of larger strategic goals.
• Determine the operational timeline: Is there any time frame for the achievement of the operational plan?
• Define your resource requirements: Estimate what resources are needed for the execution of the operational plan.
• Estimate the operational budget: Based on your resource requirements, estimate costs and define an operational budget.
• Set a hiring plan: Are there any skills gaps that need to be filled in your organization?
• Set key performance indicators: Define metrics and performance tracking procedures to measure your team’s performance.

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Operational Plan Template

Use this free Operational Plan Template for Word to manage your projects better.

What Should be Included in an Operational Plan?

Your operational plan should describe your business operations as accurately as possible so that internal teams know how the company works and how they can help achieve the larger strategic objectives. Here’s a list of some of the key elements that you’ll need to consider when writing an operational plan.

Executive Summary

An executive summary is a brief document that summarizes the content of larger documents like business plans, strategic plans or operation plans. Their main purpose is to provide a quick overview for busy stakeholders.

Operational Budget

An operational budget is an estimation of the expected operating costs and revenues for a given time period. As with other types of budget, the operational budget defines the amount of money that’s available to acquire raw materials, equipment or anything else that’s needed for business operations.

It’s important to limit your spending to stay below your operational budget, otherwise, your company could run out of resources to execute its normal activities. You can use our free operating budget template for Excel to track your operating costs.

Operational Objectives

It’s essential to align your operational objectives with your strategic objectives. For example, if one of your strategic objectives is to increase sales by 25 percent over the next three years, one possible operational objective would be to hire new sales employees. You should always grab your strategic plan objectives and turn them into one or multiple action items .

Processes & Workflows

Explain the various business processes, workflows and tasks that need to be executed to achieve your operational objectives. Make sure to explain what resources are needed, such as raw materials, equipment or human resources.

Operational Timeline

It’s important to establish a timeline for your operational plan. In most cases, your operational plan will have the same length as your strategic plan, but in some scenarios, you might create multiple operational plans for specific purposes. Not all operational plans are equal, so the length of your operational timeline will depend on the duration of your projects , workflows and processes.

Hiring Plan

Find any skills gap there might be in your team. You might need to hire a couple of individuals or even create new departments in order to execute your business processes .

Quality Assurance and Control

Most companies implement quality assurance and control procedures for a variety of reasons such as customer safety and regulatory compliance. In addition, quality assurance issues can cost your business millions, so establishing quality management protocols is a key step in operational planning.

Key Performance Indicators

It’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the productivity of your business operations. You can define as many KPIs as needed for all your business processes. For example, you can define KPIs for marketing, sales, product development and other key departments in your company. This can include product launch deadlines, number of manufactured goods, number of customer service cases closed, number of 5-star reviews received, number of customers acquired, revenue increased by a certain percentage and so on.

Risks, Assumptions and Constraints

Note any potential risks, assumptions and time or resource constraints that might affect your business operations.

Free Operational Plan Template

Leverage everything you’ve learned today with our template. This free operational plan template for Word will help you define your budget, timeline, KPIs and more. It’s the perfect first step in organizing and improving your operations. Download it today.

What Are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

Every plan has a massive effect on all team members involved, and those can be to your company’s benefit or to their detriment. If it’s to their detriment, it’s best to find out as soon as possible so you can modify your operational plan and pivot with ease.

But that’s the whole point of operational planning: you get to see the effect of your operations on the business’s bottom line in real time, or at every benchmark, so you know exactly when to pivot. And with a plan that’s as custom to each department as an operational plan, you know exactly where things go wrong and why.

How ProjectManager Can Help with Operational Planning

Creating and implementing a high-quality operational plan is the best way to ensure that your organization starts out a project on the right foot. ProjectManager has award-winning project management tools to help you craft and execute such a plan.

Gantt charts are essential to create and monitor operational plans effectively. ProjectManager helps you access your Gantt chart online so you can add benchmarks for operational performance reviews. You can also create tasks along with dependencies to make the operation a surefire success.

Whether you’re a team of IT system administrators, marketing experts, or engineers, ProjectManager includes robust planning and reporting tools. Plan in sprints, assign due dates, collaborate with team members and track everything with just the click of a button. Plus, we have numerous ready-made project reports that can be generated instantly, including status reports, variance reports, timesheet reports and more.

Related Operations Management Content

• Operational Strategy: A Quick Guide
• Operations Management: Key Functions, Roles and Skills
• Operational Efficiency: A Quick Guide
• Using Operational Excellence to Be More Productive

Operational planning isn’t done in a silo, and it doesn’t work without the full weight of the team backing it up. Ensure that your department is successful at each benchmark. ProjectManager is an award-winning pm software dedicated to helping businesses smooth out their operational plans for a better year ahead. Sign up for our free 30-day trial today.

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Create an Operational Plan that Makes an Impact

Companies often confuse strategic, tactical, and operational planning. Strategic planning sets your organization’s long-term vision and goals. Tactical planning is the process of figuring out how to achieve your strategic plan. And operational planning links the two, outlining the procedural steps you’ll take to meet your goals. A sound operational plan is critical for achieving success in your organization.

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of creating actionable steps that your team can take to meet the goals in your strategic plan. An operational plan outlines daily, weekly, and monthly tasks for each department or employee. During operational planning, you’ll also create milestones that help you achieve your strategic plan. For example, if your strategic plan aims to grow your customer base by 20%, your operational plan will include incremental steps to gain new leads and customers.

What Are the Benefits of an Operational Plan?

A well-constructed operational plan makes everyone’s jobs easier. The benefits include:

• Clear guidance: With actionable steps for each department, operational plans help teams understand if they are performing well or need to improve.
• Better workflow : Each team knows what they’ll be working on over the month or quarter, and they can adjust their workflow as needed.
• Improves morale : All employees can see how their day-to-day work connects to the company’s broader goals.

Creating an Effective Operational Plan

Operational plans help you hit strategic goals, so start by reviewing your strategic plan. Your operational plan should be specific to a department or team, so your organization will likely have more than one operational plan. Identify the key stakeholders for a particular team: they’ll be best suited to develop the plan, which should include:

• Departmental objectives
• Key performance indicators
• Staffing and budget needs
• Process for tracking and reporting on progress

Once the plan is complete, you can replicate this process for each department. Plans should be shared department-wide for feedback and questions.

Operational Goals

Also referred to as departmental goals or objectives, operational goals are the short-term targets that your organization wants to hit. An operational plan includes operational goals and the steps to achieve them. Typically, organizational goals are:

• Tied to a specific department or team
• Tied to a budget line or item
• Tied to a specific short time frame, such as a month or a quarter

Operational Goals Examples

All operational goals should be measurable and actionable. Actionable means your team can achieve them – so the goal cannot be dependent on an outside factor. For example, your IT team may be tasked with training 10 new employees on security best practices each quarter. But if 10 employees aren’t hired in a particular quarter, that operational goal is not actionable.

To be measurable, there must be a clear way to tell if you met your operational goal or not. For example, one operational goal for an accounting team might be to process invoices more quickly. Their accounting software should be able to collect data on how quickly invoices are processed and paid, so the team can measure their performance over time and see if they are working more efficiently.

Share Your Operational Plan

An operational plan shouldn’t be static – it’s a living document. As time goes on, you may need to adjust your operational goals. That isn’t a sign of failure – it means you’re doing a better job of understanding how each team functions and setting your targets accordingly. You should keep your plan up to date and revisit it regularly, whether once a year or at the end of each fiscal quarter. Include key stakeholders in this process so that the plan works for everyone.

Start Your Operational Plan with Spider Impact

Creating an operational plan might seem challenging at first – but once you get started, it can help all your teams run more smoothly. See how Spider Impact helps you define, measure, manage and report on your operational goals. Click for a free test drive or demo .

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10+ Operational Planning Examples to Fulfill your Strategic Goals

By Danesh Ramuthi , Oct 25, 2023

An operational plan is a comprehensive, action-driven document that maps out how daily activities within an organization fuel the journey towards achieving strategic objectives.

Essentially acting as the nexus between high-level strategy and practical execution, this plan ensures that every department, from human resources to specific departments, operates in synchrony, aligning their day-to-day activities with the broader strategic goals.

By streamlining processes, it fosters cohesive efforts amongst diverse cross-functional teams, ensuring that both individual team members and entire departments work together harmoniously towards the company goals.

Ready to sculpt your organization’s future? Start your journey with venngage business plan maker and leverage their expertly crafted operational plan templates . 

Click to jump ahead: 

Why is an operational plan important?

10 operational plan examples, what should an operational plan include, how to write an operational plan.

• Strategic plan vs operational plan: What is the difference? 

In summary 

An operational plan is crucial because it serves as a bridge between a company’s high-level strategic planning and its day-to-day activities, ensuring that the business operations align with the strategic goals. 

While a strategic plan provides a long-term vision, outlining the company’s objectives and goals to gain competitive advantages in the business environment, the operational plan outlines the specific actions, key elements and resource allocation required to achieve those objectives. 

For example, while the strategic plan might set a goal for revenue growth over the fiscal year, the operational plan provides a detailed roadmap, breaking down major projects, assigning responsibilities to individual team members or specific departments and setting key performance indicators to monitor progress and ensure the entire organization works together effectively.

Operational planning, in essence, transforms the strategic objectives into actionable plans, ensuring that the entire team, from department heads to diverse cross-functional teams, is aligned and works in tandem to support revenue growth, increase productivity, and achieve the desired outcomes. 

Operational plans, through a well-structured operational planning process, also provide a clear understanding of the day-to-day activities, allowing team members to know their roles, leading to better collaboration and synergy. 

Moreover, by having clear operational plan examples or templates, businesses can ensure realistic expectations, manage their operating budget effectively and track progress through key performance metrics, thus ensuring that the company stays on course to realize its long-term vision.

Operational plans play a pivotal role in the business landscape, bridging the gap between strategic vision and tangible actions. They translate the overarching goals of an organization into detailed procedures, ensuring that daily operations are in line with the desired strategic outcomes. 

In the section below, I will explore a few operational plan examples, shedding light on their structure and importance.

Business operational plan example

A business operational plan is a comprehensive document that elucidates the specific day-to-day activities of a company. It presents a detailed overview of the company’s organizational structure, management team, products or services and the underlying marketing and sales strategies. 

For businesses, irrespective of their size, an operational plan can prove invaluable. By laying down the business goals and objectives, it acts as a blueprint, guiding entrepreneurs through the creation and implementation of strategies and action plans. The planning process also incorporates mechanisms to track progress and performance. 

Additionally, for startups or companies looking to scale, a meticulously crafted operational plan can be pivotal in securing funds from potential investors and lenders.

Layered on this are details about the company’s organizational structure, its products or services and its marketing and sales strategies. 

The document also delineates the roles and responsibilities of each team member, especially the management and key personnel. Given the dynamic nature of the business environment, it is imperative to revisit and update the operational plan regularly.

Related: 15+ Business Plan Templates for Strategic Planning

Simple operational plan example

A simple operational plan, often used by startups or smaller enterprises, emphasizes the basics, ensuring that the fundamental aspects of the business operations are captured succinctly. While it might not delve into the intricacies of every operation, it provides an overview of day-to-day activities, highlighting the goals and objectives the business aims to achieve in the short term.

In essence, this plan revolves around core elements like the company’s main objectives for the fiscal year, key responsibilities assigned to individual team members and basic resource allocation. A straightforward market analysis might also be included, offering insights into customer needs and competitive advantages the business hopes to leverage.

Though simple, this operational plan example remains pivotal for the organization. It provides a roadmap, guiding team members through their daily responsibilities while ensuring that everyone is working together towards shared goals. It becomes especially essential for diverse cross-functional teams, where clarity of roles can lead to increased productivity.

Modern operational plan example

In today’s fast-paced business environment, the emphasis on efficiency and innovative processes is paramount. The modern operational plan example caters precisely to this demand. Ideal for organizations aiming to streamline processes and highlight workflow, this type of operational plan emphasizes a more dynamic approach to planning. 

It not only reflects the evolving nature of business operations but also provides a modern backdrop for content, ensuring that the presentation resonates with the current trends and technological advancements. The use of modern tools and platforms within this plan enables diverse cross-functional teams to work together seamlessly, ensuring that day-to-day activities are synchronized with the company’s long-term vision.

Furthermore, such an operational plan helps the entire organization stay agile, adapting rapidly to changes in the business environment and ensuring alignment with strategic goals.

Minimalist operational plan example

The minimalist operational plan example champions simplicity and clarity. By focusing on clear and concise business strategies, it eliminates any potential ambiguity, ensuring that team members and stakeholders have an unclouded understanding of the company’s objectives and goals. 

The minimalist design not only promotes easy comprehension but also aligns with the modern trend of decluttering, ensuring that only the most vital components of the operational planning process are highlighted. 

This approach leaves no room for confusion, streamlining the planning process and making sure that individual team members and departments are aligned with the business’s key objectives. 

Moreover, the flexibility offered by a minimalist design allows businesses to craft an operational plan template that is not only functional but also accurately reflects their brand image and core values, ensuring cohesion across all aspects of the business strategy.

Clean operational plan example

The clean operational plan example stands as a testament to this principle. Ideal for businesses that prioritize clarity and directness, this format seeks to convey goals and strategies without overwhelming stakeholders. 

While maintaining a neat and organized layout, it ensures that tasks are managed effectively, helping team members grasp their roles and responsibilities without getting lost in excessive details.

One of the primary advantages of a clean operational plan is its ability to eliminate distractions and focus solely on the critical aspects of operational planning. 

Such a design aids in making sure that diverse cross-functional teams can work together harmoniously ensuring that day-to-day activities align seamlessly with the company’s long-term vision. 

The simplicity of the clean operational plan not only supports revenue growth by ensuring efficiency but also reinforces the company’s strategic goals, making it an excellent tool in the arsenal of businesses that believe in clear communication and precise execution.  

An effective operational plan acts as a roadmap, directing how resources should be allocated and tasks should be performed to meet the company’s objectives. Here’s what a comprehensive operational plan should encompass:

• Goals and objectives : Whether short-term or long-term, the operational plan should define clear goals and objectives that align with the company’s strategic plan. This gives direction to the entire organization, ensuring everyone is working towards a common aim.
• Clear responsibilities for team members : It’s essential that team members understand their roles within the operational plan. By outlining who is responsible for what, the plan ensures that there are no overlaps or gaps in duties and that everyone has clarity on their day-to-day activities.
• Assigned tasks: Alongside responsibilities, specific tasks need to be allocated to individual team members or specific departments. This granularity in assignment ensures that every aspect of the operational plan is covered.
• Timeline: This provides a clear schedule for when each task or objective should start and finish. A well-defined timeline assists in monitoring progress and ensures that the plan stays on track.
• Budget and resources : Every operational plan needs to factor in the budget and resources available. This includes everything from the operating budget to human resources, ensuring that the business has everything it needs to execute the plan effectively.

Read Also: 6 Steps to Create a Strategic HR Plan [With Templates]

As businesses evolve, it’s essential to have a comprehensive and adaptive operational plan in place to navigate the complexities of the business environment. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you craft an effective operational plan:

Step 1: Define your goals and objectives

Begin with a clear understanding of your strategic goals and objectives. This will act as a foundation for your operational plan. Ensure that these goals are in alignment with your company’s strategic plan and provide both short-term and long-term visions for the business.

Step 2: Determine roles and responsibilities

Identify the key stakeholders, department heads and team members who will play pivotal roles in executing the plan. Assign responsibilities to ensure that everyone knows their part in the planning process and day-to-day activities.

Step 3: Develop a timeline and milestones

Establish a clear timeline that breaks down the operational planning process. Include key milestones to track progress and ensure the plan remains on target.

Step 4: Allocate budget and resources

Determine the resources required to achieve your goals and objectives. This includes estimating the operating budget, identifying human resources needs and other resource allocations, ensuring you have everything in place to support revenue growth and other business needs.

Step 5: Outline day-to-day operations

Detail the day activities that are integral to the business operations. This will provide clarity on how different tasks and functions work together, ensuring efficiency across diverse cross-functional teams.

Step 6: Monitor and measure performance

Integrate key performance metrics and indicators to regularly monitor progress. Using both leading and lagging indicators will provide a comprehensive view of how well the operational plan is being executed and where improvements can be made.

Step 7: Review and adjust regularly

The business environment is dynamic and as such, your operational plan should be adaptable. Regularly review the plan, comparing actual outcomes with desired outcomes and adjust as necessary to account for changes in the business environment or company goals.

Step 8: Document and communicate

Create an operational plan document, potentially using operational plan examples or an operational plan template for guidance. Ensure that the entire team, from individual team members to the entire organization, is informed and aligned with the plan.

Related: 7 Best Business Plan Software for 2023

Strategic plan vs operational plan: What is the difference?

When running an organization, both strategic and operational planning play pivotal roles in ensuring success. However, each has a distinct purpose, time horizon and scope. Here’s a breakdown of the differences between these two essential business plans:

• Strategic plan : This plan sets the course for the organization’s future. It embodies the long-term vision and mission, detailing the objectives necessary to achieve it. The essence is how everyone, from C-suite executives to individual team members, collaborates towards realizing this vision.
• Operational plan : This is the roadmap for the day-to-day activities of the organization. While the strategic plan looks at the bigger picture, the operational plan hones in on the tactics and execution. It is crafted to support organizational goals with a focus on short-term activities specific to departments or functions.

Time horizon :

• Strategic plan : Long-term in nature, usually spanning three to five years.
• Operational plan : Concentrates on the short-term, with plans laid out yearly, quarterly, or even monthly.

Modification and updates :

• Strategic plan : This evolves over longer intervals, typically three to five years. There might be minor adjustments year over year based on changing business needs and the external business environment.
• Operational plan : Due to its short-term focus, it requires frequent assessments. Plans might be adjusted yearly, quarterly or even monthly to ensure alignment with the strategic objectives and current business environment.

Created by :

• Strategic plan : Crafted by the upper echelons of management – think CEO, CFO and other C-suite members.
• Operational plan : These plans come to life through mid-level management and department heads, ensuring alignment with the broader strategic vision while catering to specific departmental needs.
• Strategic plan : Broad in its outlook, it takes into account external factors like market trends, competition, customer needs and technological innovations.
• Operational plan : This narrows down the focus to the internal workings of the organization. It revolves around technology in use, key performance indicators, budgeting, projects, tasks and the allocation of responsibilities among team members.

As we’ve traversed through the importance of operational planning to various operational plan examples, it becomes evident that having a detailed and efficient operational plan is pivotal. 

From the business-centric to the minimalist approach, every operational plan serves as the backbone, guiding team members and ensuring that day-to-day activities align with the long-term vision and strategic goals.

By knowing what should be included in these plans and how to craft them, businesses can navigate the complexities of their operational environment with greater confidence.

For those looking to refine their planning process or start from scratch, the world of digital tools has made it significantly easier. Venngage offers business plan maker and operational plan templates designed to simplify the process. 

Whether you need to create an operational plan or draft a business strategy, their intuitive platform can guide you every step of the way.

How to write an operational plan for your business

Table of Contents

What is an operational plan? 

What should your business’s operational plan include , objectives , production , finances , simplify your operational finances and more with countingup.

If you plan to start a small business, you’ll need to prepare for success. A business plan will help you organise your services and structure to set up and earn funding. But an operational plan is essential to managing your day-to-day. 

This guide will cover how to write an operational plan for your business, including: 

• What is an operational plan?
• How can an operational plan help your business? 
• What should your operations plan include?

An operational plan outlines the physical requirements of running your business and how you’ll function daily. It can be its own document or a section of your business plan. Either way, the operational plan answers essential questions about how you’ll make your business earn a profit. 

This plan covers your business’s who, what, where, when, and how much, similar to a company description . But your operational plan dives into the nitty-gritty details and outlines exactly how you’ll achieve them. 

Writing an operational plan for your business will help you determine the essential materials to set up. The more detailed it is, the easier it will be to organise your business and increase productivity. As your operations grow, you can update the plan to fit your needs, so check in with it regularly. 

If you wonder how to write an operational plan for your business, you’ll need to know some key components. We’ll outline the essentials. 

The first step to outlining your operations is considering your objectives . Objectives are the specific things you want to achieve for your business in a particular time frame. For example, you may want to achieve profitability within the first six months. Or you might aim to use paid advertising to double your client base in a year. 

Create different objectives based on the departments or sectors of your business. For example, you can form financial, marketing, sales, and development objectives. To develop effective plans, use the SMART method, short for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. 

Next, you’ll have to consider the logistics of where you’ll run your business. Are your operations home-based or will you need an office or shop? If you need to find a space, outline where it will be and how you plan to do it. You may need to use a real estate or letting agency to purchase or let a space. 

So, discuss that process, when you plan to have a location, and how much you’ll spend. Costs will include things like rent, electricity, water, and any other elements you’ll need to include. For example, you might need to fit a cafe with kitchen equipment or decorate the space. 

If you already have an office or shop, provide the address. For a customer-facing shop or office, outline the working hours. 

Once you decide where you’ll run your business, you’ll need to consider the how. In this part, outline daily operating procedures. Which products or services will you provide? How will you offer them? Outline your structure and how you’ll achieve your objectives day-to-day.  

But your business procedures won’t be effective without a reliable production plan. If you need to develop a supply chain or keep an inventory , you’ll discuss that here. First, list which supplies, equipment, and technology you’ll need to run your business. Then, include which suppliers you’ll use to keep a stock of your products. 

Finally, detail what your production will cost by breaking it into sections. How much will you spend on your inventory each month as you start your business? What other regular expenses will you have?  

For example, if you run a coffee shop, you would outline which coffee supplier you’ll use and how much you’ll order at what cost. Then, you might include the cost of ordering baked goods for your shop and other things necessary for your business. Additional production costs might consist of shop rent, disposable cups, stirrers, milk etc. 

As you outline each aspect of your operations, consider the cost of running that aspect. Then, in the finances sections, bring each cost together. This section will help you get a broader picture of how much you’ll need to spend to run your business. 

This section also outlines where you’ll get the money to keep up these operations. Similarly, list prices for your products or services, plus the profit margin and sales goals. Then, touch on how you’ll accept payments and organise your finances. 

You might discuss what business current account you’ll use and how you’ll maintain your financial accounting . For example, you could explain how you’ll use Countingup , the business current account with built-in accounting software. 

The Countingup app offers valuable features that simplify your finances, automate processes, and help track your performance. Using a unique tool like this will make your operations more efficient and allow you to maintain accurate records. 

When writing your operational plan, it’s also important to consider your timeline. Consider outlining a daily working schedule and attaching times to different functional tasks. For example, how often will you reorder inventory? When do you plan to achieve your short-term, medium-term, and long-term objectives?

By organising your calendar, you can stay on top of what you need to do and when you need to do it. Plus, consider how you’ll manage your time well , which will help you run your business smoothly.  

Once you know how to write an operational plan for your business, you can earn money. But, financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you run a business. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup offers features that help you stay on top of your operations. With automatic expense categorisation and receipt capture, you can stay on top of your business spending and maintain accurate records. Plus, the app lets you create and send invoices on the go, helping you receive the money you earn. The app will even notify you when the invoices are received and match them to payments. 

Start your three-month free trial today. 

Find out more here .

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Operational planning: 5 steps to create a better business operational plan

Learn how to conduct operational planning to enhance collaboration, streamline workflows, and unlock peak productivity in all your company’s teams.

Webflow Enterprise gives your teams the power to build, ship, and manage sites collaboratively at scale.

Operational planning enhances collaboration and streamlines workflows to unlock peak efficiency.

Transforming a strategic vision into business success demands meticulous planning. It requires navigating unexpected obstacles, coordinating team activities with long-term goals, and implementing practical steps to realize organizational objectives.

Organizational planning plays a pivotal role in this context by translating high-level strategies into actionable day-to-day tasks.

But an operational plan is more than a structured to-do list — it’s a comprehensive framework that outlines roles, responsibilities, and timelines. By breaking down grand strategies into executable actions, operational planning ensures cohesive teamwork and transforms ambiguous business strategies into achievable realities.

What’s operational planning?

Operational planning is how companies organize day-to-day tasks to align with broader strategic goals. It’s a road map guiding teams through operational decisions about daily operations, ensuring every task contributes to the company’s long-term and high-level objectives. This typically involves setting short-term objectives, defining key activities, and establishing clear timelines.

In practice, operational planning often blends traditional and innovative methods to maximize efficiency. Conventional strategies like Gantt charts and flowcharts help leaders visualize data , tasks, and timelines to make complex projects more manageable. And digital tools like enterprise project management software introduce automation, real-time collaboration, and data analytics into the mix. These platforms enable agile plan adjustments and offer insights through predictive analytics.

By integrating these mixed methodologies, operational planning helps enterprises build a system that’s efficient and responsive to evolving business needs. It bridges the gap between meticulous organization and the agility needed in a fast-paced business environment.

Benefits of operational planning

Operational planning offers a structured approach to decision-making, but its advantages extend beyond planning. Here’s why it’s a crucial tool for achieving organizational goals.

Clarifies goals

Operational planning turns abstract ideas into concrete objectives. It encourages setting explicit goals with definitive timelines. This clarity benefits leadership and the entire team, ensuring everyone understands what needs doing, who’s doing it, and by when.

Enhances productivity

An operational plan enhances productivity by establishing timelines, outlining objectives, and allocating resources. This structure helps team members prioritize their work and manage their time efficiently because they have clear deadlines to guide them.

By defining precise objectives, the plan ensures every team member understands their specific tasks and expected outcomes, preventing unnecessary work and deviations from the plan. And knowing what resources are available helps team members prepare realistically for their taskwork.

Improves efficiency

A well-crafted operational plan boosts efficiency by optimizing workflows and streamlining organizational processes . By mapping out immediate and long-term objectives, the plan establishes a clear blueprint for task execution. As team members better understand their roles, task sequence, and the rationale behind each, they can execute them more seamlessly. This clarity and structure are also invaluable for onboarding new team members and allow them to integrate and understand the workflow with less friction.

Strategic planning vs. operational planning

Both plan types are distinct yet essential components of an organization’s overall planning process. Let’s break down the primary differences:

• A strategic plan defines your company’s “what,” outlines your business’s direction, and sets broad, long-term objectives. It’s a high-level overview that articulates your mission statement, establishes key business objectives, and outlines strategies for achieving them. This plan typically spans several years into the future and aligns the company’s efforts with its overarching vision.
• An operational plan focuses on the “how” by detailing how to execute the strategies and goals laid out in the strategic plan. This is where you get into the specifics — setting milestones, crafting a detailed road map, and establishing short-term, incremental goals that steer your company toward achieving strategic objectives. And at this point, you’ll focus on more immediate factors, like dealing with daily management and task implementation, that are necessary to achieve strategic organizational goals.

Types of operational plans

Departmental goals and needs vary significantly, and tailored operational plans ensure you optimally manage each area. While a sales department might need a plan focused on customer engagement and retention, an IT department might emphasize technology upgrades and cybersecurity . Combining various plan types — like a couple of those that follow — ensures optimal management and effectiveness in each area, aligning departmental activities with broader objectives.

Project operation plans

Project operation plans are indispensable documents for breaking projects into actionable milestones and assigning teams to relevant tasks. A well-developed project plan organizes tasks and anticipates resource requirements such as personnel, infrastructure, and time. By identifying these requirements early on, project operation plans provide planning foresight that helps avoid resource shortages and last-minute scrambles to ensure projects progress smoothly and stay on track.

Say you’re designing a website . Your project operation plan will outline key steps, such as user research , wireframing , user testing , and launch. Each step would have assigned teams, deadlines, and specific objectives, like establishing focus groups by a certain date and finalizing prototypes. The project manager would monitor progress to ensure resource availability and timeline adherence.

Enterprise operation plans

Enterprise operation plans translate broader strategic goals into smaller, manageable milestones. They involve assigning responsibility for these milestones to department directors to ensure accountability for each plan segment.

When creating an enterprise operational plan, it’s vital to identify resource gaps, dependencies, and other potential obstacles to ensure seamless execution. This lets you set realistic, achievable milestones and achieve smooth interdepartmental coordination. Involving directors from the start is also crucial because their insights can reveal critical aspects you might otherwise overlook.

Consider a web design agency planning to expand their service offerings to include mobile app development over the next year. The enterprise operational plan might include milestones such as hiring app developers, training current staff in responsive mobile design , and marketing these new services to potential leads. You might also ask the development head to oversee recruitment and training and involve the marketing director in developing strategies to promote the new services.

IT operation plans

IT departments confront unique challenges due to rapid cybersecurity threats and their critical role in every business sector. Unlike other departments focusing on sales and marketing, IT departments must ensure the organization’s technological structure is robust, secure, and current.

IT operation plans typically outline how the department will adapt to business changes, like scaling up for new hires, migrating from a legacy system to a new one, and safeguarding the organization against evolving cybersecurity threats.

If you’re preparing for a major server infrastructure upgrade, for instance, an IT operation plan will outline steps like evaluating current server and hosting capacities, selecting new hardware and infrastructure, and scheduling website migration to new servers. The plan would include specific timelines — such as completing server evaluations by the end of the first quarter and starting the migration in the second quarter — to ensure minimal downtime and a smooth transition for all hosted websites.

Discover how the right CMS can allow teams to efficiently scale rich, complex content – all without writing code.

Key elements of an operational plan

No matter the type you’re creating, most operational plans include the following core traits.

Operational plans should be clear and to the point. While comprehensive coverage is important, elaborating too much risks misinterpretation and becoming bogged down in the details. Focus on concise, direct explanations and allow the details to unfold during project execution.

Team buy-in is essential for success. Instead of leaving the executive team to dictate the plan exclusively, involve team members in its creation. A collaborative approach helps garner buy-in and fosters feelings of ownership and responsibility toward the plan’s objectives. This involvement translates to increased motivation and commitment because team members feel more likely to invest effort in a plan they helped shape.

Consistency

Consistency in operational plans is crucial for their effectiveness and for establishing organizational trust. It involves applying the same standards and procedures uniformly across all departments and teams. By consistently applying rules and policies, you ensure every organizational element operates under the same guidelines, enhancing fairness and reducing confusion. Consistent execution of your operational plan also streamlines progress and success tracking because the criteria and methods used for each remain uniform.

Specify the processes and methodologies each department should use. If the design team uses an agile, iterative process , for instance, implement similar practices in other departments like IT. This standardization enables smoother collaboration and operational harmony.

Key performance indicators

Every operational plan needs well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) from the outset. These should include:

• Leading indicators provide early insights into your strategy’s effectiveness by signaling shifts and trends ahead of their full realization. By monitoring these indicators, you can gauge your strategy’s immediate impact and proactively adjust your approach. Indicator examples include customer satisfaction levels, changes in market share, and fluctuations in sales figures.
• Lagging indicators reflect the outcomes of your operational efforts by providing historical data on your plan’s efficacy after execution. Key lagging indicators include metrics like the time taken to complete projects, support ticket volumes, and total expenses incurred. Analyzing these metrics also helps identify improvement areas, like optimizing resource allocation, enhancing customer support processes, and streamlining operational workflows.

Constraints

Acknowledge any assumptions and constraints within your plan, such as technological limitations, tight deadlines, and regulatory requirements. Being upfront about these factors is essential for setting realistic expectations and guiding effective task execution. And it ensures everyone involved understands the framework they’re operating in.

Say you’re building an agency website in the European Union (EU). A critical constraint would be compliance with data protection regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You must keep this constraint in mind as you develop your operational plan because it affects the technology and processes used for data handling and shapes your website’s design and functionality. For instance, you’ll likely need to integrate clear consent mechanisms for data collection, prominent user data management tools into the website’s layout, and GDPR-compliant technologies for data processing and storage.

The 5 steps of the operational planning process

Enterprises develop operational plans through five strategic steps, each essential for shaping an actionable and effective strategy. Let’s explore what this planning process looks like.

1. Set goals

Establish specific, immediate business goals that align with your strategic plan. This might include launching a redesigned website, increasing online sales by a specific percentage, or reducing digital marketing expenses.

Make these goals ambitious yet adaptable, allowing for flexible responses to unexpected challenges. This step lays the foundation for your operational strategy and aligns every subsequent action toward these well-defined objectives.

2. Allocate resources

After establishing your goals, evaluate your capacity to achieve them. Analyze your current resources and identify what additional expertise, technology, and budget you require. This step isn’t just about highlighting what’s missing — it’s about strategizing how to scale your business to accommodate these needs.

3. Define KPIs

Select KPIs that align closely with your operational goals and ensure they reflect key aspects of your strategy. These KPIs should include leading indicators, like website traffic and user engagement rates for predictive analytics, and lagging indicators, such as satisfaction scores post-launch, to evaluate past performance. Consistently apply these KPIs throughout your project to monitor progress and keep the team focused on core objectives.

Consider using digital analytic platforms like Google Analytics to track KPIs. These tools offer detailed insights into traffic and user behavior. And you can set up dashboards to visually represent these metrics to help spot trends and patterns without combing through data.

Suppose you notice rising bounce rates on a specific webpage — this might indicate user disinterest or navigational issues. In response, you might pivot to revise the page’s copy, restructure its visual hierarchy , or simplify the navigation structure to make it more engaging and user-friendly.

4. Prescribe processes

Develop clear and detailed plans for how your teams should execute tasks. This clarity guides them through each stage, reducing confusion, ensuring consistency, and enhancing productivity.

To communicate these procedures to your team, use tools like flowcharts. They simplify and clarify each operational plan phase and help ensure everyone understands their responsibilities.

For large-scale projects, consider using project management software like Asana, Trello, or Jira. These platforms offer features like task assignment, deadline tracking, and real-time communication, and they provide a centralized platform for monitoring progress and maintaining team alignment.

5. Determine milestones

Create a road map that outlines clear, measurable goals and specific objectives. This map transforms your operational plan into achievable targets, helping teams visualize where they’re headed and the benchmarks they need to hit. Host regular meetings when outlining your milestones — this consistent evaluation ensures everyone moves forward in sync, maintaining the necessary momentum to achieve the plan’s goals.

In a web development project, for example, these evaluations might reveal if certain phases, like design or development, have too few or surplus resources. Identifying these imbalances lets you efficiently reallocate resources to ensure each department has what it needs to meet its milestones effectively and on schedule.

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How to write an operational plan in business plan?

• What is an Operational Business Plan?

An operational business plan is explaining how you will achieve your business goals. An operational plan discusses everything from management, employees, products or services , project management, and supply chain to HR. 

What Goes Into Operational Plan In Business Plan

How do you write operational plan for business plan.

The details of an operational plan business plan will be different for every business, depending on its type, size, and product. 

A business operational plan should also show that you understand the manufacturing or sourcing of the product you are going to sell and you have already progressed in your business.

WiseBusinessPlans is one of the best business plan writing companies !

An operational business plan is needed for the business as a whole and for each department separately too. For a small business, these three criteria can help develop an operational plan.

Set Goals and Build Operational Plan Around Goals 

You have already set goals for your business; it is time to set goals for different departments or divisions. 

The department goals will align with business goals and help the company achieve them. 

After setting goals in an  operational plan in business plan , you will break down the process of achieving them into small, measurable, tasks. You have heard about SMART goals ; the SMART goals principle is applicable everywhere in the operations plan business plan. 

The small and measurable tasks we mentioned before are also called key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI shows a measurable value contributed towards achieving business goals.

Assign Responsibilities and Tasks 

So far in your  operational plan in a business plan, y ou have set your business goals and department goals. You have broken it down into SMART tasks and KPIs. It is time to assign these tasks and responsibilities to the right people. 

A goal without a deadline is just a dream; set a timeline for each goal. Also, explain to your team if this is an ongoing or a single-use plan. 

You can understand single-use plans in terms of a project and an ongoing project in terms of the tasks you do when you don’t have a project.

Outline Resources 

Define the resources you need for each goal. These resources may include spending on software, tools & equipment required to work, training, etc. 

Determining resources requirement when writing an  operational plan in business plan  helps you plan well and increase the efficiency of the team.

You will have a top-notch operation plan in business plan when you write about these aspects.

• Prioritize Goals: Focus on important goals only. It will be hard to decide but you should direct your time and efforts to achieve the goals with the most impact.
• Set KPIs: KPIs are the small tasks that contribute toward achieving goals. KPIs measure the growth of your business.
• Discuss Manufacturing Process: If you are manufacturing your products, outline the manufacturing process. Discuss manufacturing facility, manufacturing capacity, material sourcing, factory to warehouse logistics, and warehouse to sale points logistics.
• Include Costs and Expenses: What are the expenses you will need to make to achieve these goals? Give a detailed breakdown of the costs and expenses required for each goal. 
• Set Budgets: Set budgets for each goal. Fixing a budget will help you get creative within the resources and not overspend. 
• Build a Hiring Plan: You will need to hire people regularly. Develop a hiring plan and define who you want to hire, what will be the hiring process, will be the salaries and benefits for the employee.
• Set Work Hours: Determine what will be your working hours. Will you go for the typical 9-5 or you will need employees in off hours for completing projects
• Determine Employee Location Requirements: Decide if you need an employee in the office or on the site. See if you can allow employees to work from home if the need arises.

Risk Management: In the operational plan in a business plan,  Identify the risks you are facing and prepare a contingency plan when needed.

Set Quality Control Processes: Quality control is used to maintain and improve product quality. Assign quality control systems building and management to an employee or create a department for better management. 

Develop Management Plans: Management plans are an overreaching framework for the company management, department management, project management, etc. See how many management plans you need to make for your business.

Set Timelines and Milestones: Milestones are the big achievements. Setting milestones and timelines will help your team understand what they need to achieve and how much time they can take for it.

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Operational Plan For Businesses With A Physical Product

When you are going to sell a physical product like shoes, clothing, tool, etc, you will need to plan the manufacturing or sourcing process. 

Many businesses opt for manufacturing at their facilities while others may prefer OEM manufacturing. In both cases, you need to outline the process and establish policies. 

Here are the parts of an  operational plan in business plan  for a business selling physical products. 

Discuss how you will manufacture products for your business. If you have a manufacturing facility, explain the manufacturing capacity of your business. 

If you are sourcing your product from a manufacturer, discusses who is the manufacturer or how you will select a manufacturer.

Industry Association Membership

Approach industry associations like chambers of commerce or organizations of the manufacturers for the same/similar products as you. 

Getting into industry association memberships help you with networking, exploring new opportunities, understanding the market better, and preparing you for the long term.

Supply Chain

A supply chain is important for every business selling a product. 

A supply chain is a network between a manufacturer and a seller. It includes manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor, shipping, and fulfillment to the seller location. 

Even when you are manufacturing products for your business, you will need to establish a different supply chain. You will need to build materials sourcing supply chain. You will also need to plan how the products will be shipped to the retail locations from your warehouse.

Quality Control 

Explain your quality control process in detail when writing an  operational plan in business plan . 

A quality control process is aimed at maintaining or improving product quality. Quality control is set up with safety measures to make sure faulty products don’t end up with the customers. 

Quality control processes are different for every business and largely depend on the product type.

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An operational plan outlines the day-to-day activities and processes required to run your business. It covers areas such as production, logistics, inventory management, facilities, staffing, and other operational aspects.

An operational plan should include details about your business’s physical location, equipment and technology, production processes, supply chain management, staffing requirements, and key operational milestones or targets.

Define the production or service delivery process in the operational plan by outlining the steps involved, the resources required, and the timelines for each stage. Include details about quality control measures and any necessary regulatory compliance.

Address potential operational challenges or risks in the plan by identifying them and providing strategies or contingency plans to mitigate them. This could include backup suppliers, emergency response protocols, or alternative production methods.

The operational plan demonstrates how your business will execute its strategies and deliver its products or services. It helps stakeholders understand the practical aspects of your business, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively and operations run smoothly.

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Operational Plan: Meaning, Example, Steps, Types And Importance

Ayesha is the operations project manager at a radiology informatics organization that intends to open three more imaging centers in…

Ayesha is the operations project manager at a radiology informatics organization that intends to open three more imaging centers in different cities. The strategic plan goals for the company involve diversifying the practice, but Ayesha is aware that the details of how such goals will be accomplished won’t be in the strategic plan; they’ll have to be in the operational plan .

Ayesha and her team set about creating a tactical, detail-oriented operational plan to meet the goals outlined in the strategic plan. They chalk out targets for outreach, IT, development, research and staffing.

• Arjun has to create the overall outreach strategy
• Mehek’s tasks include deploying the radiology report search engine and upgrading the voice dictation system
• Mohit is responsible for getting the website and staff credentials database up and running
• Shruti has to design the online research form for data entry requests
• Zayed is told to oversee the filling of informatics vacancies at the firm

Every team member’s progress and goal-fulfillment are recorded for each quarter of the fiscal year.

With Ayesha’s leadership and her team’s focused approach, the operational plan put together helps the firm reach important goals in the strategic plan, with the practice even being able to bring on board a new consultant to aid in identifying fresh business opportunities. Theirs is a successful operational plan example .

What Is An Operational Plan?

Types of operational plans, operational planning steps.

Before going into the types of operational plans and their importance, it’s imperative to form a clear understanding of the meaning of an operational plan . Simply put, an operational plan lays out the tasks a business must carry out to reach the desired outcome. More accurately, it’s a blueprint created by a department or a team within an organization that clearly defines the actions that must be taken to fulfill strategic objectives and meet the expectations of senior management. It also adheres to daily or weekly timelines for goal fulfillment.

Let’s consider an operational plan example where an organization is strategically trying to increase its production volume by 50% by the end of the fiscal year. Important considerations in such a strategic plan will be marketing, sales and operations. The manufacturing, financial and logistic components of an operational plan in this scenario will be crucial for boosting production.

It must be remembered that an operational plan and a business plan aren’t the same. This distinction is important to further understand the meaning of an operational plan . Business plans have operations segments, so an operational plan in a business plan is but one component of the entire structure. In other words, having an operational plan in a business plan is likely, not the other way round. Within a business plan, the operational plan section focuses on every step necessary to achieve the business’s objectives.

Having covered the meaning of an operational plan and highlighted its differences from a business plan or a strategic plan, it’s a good idea to consider the different types of operational plans and the steps of operational planning .

There are two types of operational plans : single-use plans and ongoing plans. How are they different? Let’s take a look.

Single-Use Plans

These operational plans are only devised when a particular problem or a time-specific challenge needs to be tackled. For instance, cost-saving measures for a new fiscal year would need a single-use plan. ( www.stocktargetadvisor.com )

Ongoing Plans

Such plans are designed with the long-term in mind. They can be applied to future timelines and adapted whenever required. An ongoing plan would be used for strategizing on how to retain a workforce rather than resort to workforce rationalization measures.

Regardless of the type, it’s important to be clear on the steps that lead to an effective operational plan . Let’s examine what these components of an operational plan are.

Put The Strategic Plan In Place

Operational goals are dependent on strategic goals. The importance of the operational plan is indisputable, but the strategic plan must come first, as the operating plan is ultimately a tool for reaching strategic goals.

Pick The Goals That Matter Most

An operating plan example that works will invariably prioritize the most important goals. It’s tough to follow through on complicated plans with too many vague objectives.

Use Performance Metrics

Predictive indicators are crucial in gauging how a project or a team is faring. To this end, it’s always wiser to opt for leading indicators (like excellent customer feedback) rather than lagging indicators (such as the attendee headcount at an event), as leading indicators help identify potential problem areas from beforehand.

Pick KPIs Wisely And Communicate

This should be a team exercise. Outlining the most suitable KPIs for a business is imperative, and so is discussing them with the entire team.

Keeping all of these factors in mind, it’s clear that the importance of operational plans can’t be emphasized enough. There are several reasons why they’re a prominent part of goal-oriented organizations – they enhance productivity, profit margins and give businesses a competitive edge.

The ability to create and execute solid operational plans is a skill of high value. Harappa’s Rise In An Organization program is designed to help ambitious professionals master such skills. With the help of a stellar faculty and 17 dynamic lessons, you’ll learn to lead with influence, inspire trust and get things done. Frameworks and techniques such as The Performance Equation and The Flywheel Effect are designed to help senior professionals manage projects expertly, adapt to situations instinctively and become reliable team players.

The Rise In An Organization pathway is the ticket to facing challenges head-on and influencing decisions masterfully!

Harnessing generative AI in manufacturing and supply chains

Based out of New York, Rahul focuses on digital manufacturing, especially IIoT transformation design and execution.

March 25, 2024 Generative AI (gen AI) is taking the world by storm. In a recent McKinsey survey, 79 percent of global executives said they had some familiarity with it , and 22 percent said they use it regularly in their work. The technology is expected to herald a new age of efficiency in operations: in manufacturing and supply chain alone, it could reduce expenses by up to half a trillion dollars. 1

About QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey

Gen AI’s implementation needs and use cases differ from those of analytical AI . Analytical AI is broadly implemented for forecasting, set point optimization, and the use of historical data to improve processes and outcomes. Gen AI, meanwhile, opens a new frontier for problem solving, illustrated by recent innovations in content creation, insight generation, and human-like interaction (exhibit).

As gen AI models mature and establish their reliability, they will gradually converge with analytical AI in operations. Analytical AI has had significant impact in operations, and generative AI is likely to help with process acceleration, task simplification, and workforce productivity evolution.

Where gen AI can make a difference

Gen AI has a breadth of potential use cases in operations, and a picture is emerging of what an AI-driven workspace might look like, with benefits across the plan-make-deliver value stream.

In planning , gen AI can consolidate cross-functional insights and qualitative consumer sensing analysis for improved demand forecasts. It can suggest next best production plans to mitigate supply chain disruptions. And it can provide insights into inventory health or recommendations to reduce inventory.

On the manufacturing front , gen AI can unlock untapped productivity during production, leveraging root cause analysis to predict failures and reduce defects, and draft easy-to-follow dynamic work instructions. It can also augment operator stations by offering live, AI-supported troubleshooting and operating guidelines.

And in delivery , gen AI can help get products to customers on time and in full by automating document generation, verifying completions before transit, and communicating with customers on order tracking via AI chatbots. Paired with digital twins , gen AI can create warehouse designs and production scenarios faster.

While it is difficult to quantify the exact impact of discrete use cases of gen AI within operations today, early adopters have clearly shown that the technology will be a key tool to support manufacturing and supply chain organizations in becoming more flexible, efficient, and intuitive in meeting the needs of tomorrow’s end markets.

One emerging theme has been the speed at which gen AI has been able to move from idea to pilot. During pilots, organizations are experiencing significant shop floor adoption in days and weeks, rather than getting stuck in pilot purgatory for months and years.

Keep a human in the loop

Users of this revolutionary technology should be aware of the risks it introduces. These include the possibility that data fed into models will leak, the possibility of compromising IP, and exposure to liability under regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

On top of this, models have inherent biases that may amplify certain segments of data unduly, compromising the reliability of their conclusions. This underscores that AI models are not an opportunity to abandon human responsibility; human operators must take a conscientious, active hand in their use.

As in every industry, gen AI’s full operational value can be realized only through company-wide transformations. In such contexts, stakeholders benefit from a strong initial understanding of their organization’s highest-impact segments, existing technical infrastructure, and operating model. Such a process enables robust, scalable, and intuitive impact.

Gen AI is going to redefine the meaning of connected manufacturing and supply chain operations. First movers have the greatest potential to capture the value available and improve productivity.

The authors wish to thank Stephanie Rank and Marshall Riccardi for their contributions to this blog post.

1 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023.

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Nissan unveils broad plan for strategic partnerships, 30 new models and EV cost effectiveness

N issan Motor ( OTCPK:NSANY ) launched a business plan on Monday that the Japanese automaker said is aimed at driving value and enhancing both competitiveness and profitability.

As part of the Arc Plan, Nissan ( OTCPK:NSANY ) targets an additional one million in unit sales compared to fiscal year 2023 and operating profit margin of more than 6% by end of fiscal year 2026. The plan also included 30 new models to be launched by fiscal year 2026, of which 16 will be electrified. 60% of internal combustion engine passenger-vehicle models are slated to be refreshed by fiscal year 2026.

Nissan ( OTCPK:NSANY ) said it will also boost EV competitiveness by reducing the cost of next-generation EVs by 30% and achieving EV and ICE vehicle cost parity by fiscal year 2030. Significant next-generation EV cost reduction are to be achieved through grouped "family" development, with vehicle production under the approach starting in fiscal year 2027. The plans also incorporates strategic partnerships expanding into technology, product portfolio and software services. In all, new business ventures are anticipated to unlock a potential 2.5T yen in additional revenues by fiscal year 2030.

For investors, dividends and buybacks are being targeted to bring a total shareholder return of more than 30%.

"Faced with extreme market volatility, Nissan is taking decisive actions guided by the new plan to ensure sustainable growth and profitability," stated Nissan ( OTCPK:NSANY ) Chief Executive Officer Makoto Uchida.

Shares of Nissan Motor ( OTCPK:NSANY ) edged 1.05% higher in premarket trading.

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S&P Global downgrades outlooks on five regional US banks to 'negative'

Ratings agency S&P Global on Tuesday downgraded five regional U.S. banks to due to their commercial real estate (CRE) exposures, in a move likely to reignite investor concerns about the health of the sector.

El Paso job cuts part of USPS plan to process out-of-town mail in Albuquerque

The United States Postal Service, or USPS, is downsizing its El Paso mail-processing facility and sending some operations to Albuquerque.

That will cut 52 jobs at the East-Central El Paso facility, a USPS report shows. Some jobs will be reassigned, a USPS news release indicates.

The facility, at 8401 Boeing Drive , is being converted to a Local Processing Center and the processing of mail headed out of town will be shifted to the postal service's Albuquerque facility, USPS officials announced in the March 19 news release. Several million dollars will be spent to modernize the El Paso facility as part of the changes, according to the news release.

Currently a majority of the mail and packages processed at the Boeing facility are destined for areas outside of El Paso, according to the news release.

The planned changes come after the USPS did a review of the El Paso facility as part of the quasi-government corporation’s 10-year strategic plan to modernize the nation’s aging postal network.

The facility changes are projected to save the USPS $2.9 million to $3.8 million per year, with most of the savings in reduced transportation costs, the USPS final Mail Processing Facility Review report shows.

The El Paso facility will lose 52 jobs, including three management positions, according to the report. It appears the Albuquerque facility will gain jobs. The number of people employed at the El Paso center was not immediately disclosed.

The changes are projected to reduce labor costs by $420,000 to $550,000 per year, the report shows.

The USPS news release states that “no career layoffs” will result from the El Paso facility changes, and career job reassignments and reduction in “pre-career employees” will be done in accordance with labor union agreements.

Career employees work in permanent full-time or part-time jobs and usually receive federal fringe benefits,  while non-career employees work in temporary positions, usually at lower wages than for career jobs, according to a U.S. Congressional Research Service report.

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Becky Hernandez, a USPS spokeswoman for the El Paso area, declined to answer questions about the El Paso changes. She said in an email that all available information is in the USPS review report.

El Paso Postmaster Cindi Tabbot said in an email that she could not answer questions about the mail processing facility changes because she is not involved in the facility’s operations. She referred questions to Hernandez.

The conversion to a Local Processing Center is not expected to change business mail entry or El Paso Post Office branch operations, and delivery services will be enhanced, the USPS news release stated.

Up to $9 million will be invested in the Boeing Drive facility for upgrades and doing “deferred maintenance,” according to the USPS news release.

"These investments will result in expanded and streamlined package processing and distribution capabilities in the local market and new workplace amenities for USPS employees, such as new lighting, as well as renovated bathrooms and breakrooms," according to the news release.

Vic Kolenc may be reached at 915-546-6421;  [email protected] ;  @vickolenc  on Twitter , now known as X.

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Fishing industry reels over Biden's destructive wind farm plan: It's 'coming at us from every direction'

Biden admin sets aside 2m acres in gulf of maine for offshore wind turbines.

Biden's renewable energy agenda has an impact 'larger than one industry': Dustin Delano

New England Fishermen's Stewardship Association COO Dustin Delano criticizes the Biden administration's plan for wind farms near the Gulf of Maine.

Time is running out for fishermen and women in the Northeast who fear their industry is being put at risk by the Biden administration’s renewable energy agenda.

"Ground fishermen, lobstermen, whatever you are, you're under the microscope right now, and it just seems to be something coming at us from every direction," New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA) COO Dustin Delano said on " The Big Money Show " Monday.

"And with this offshore wind agenda out there to attempt to fight climate change," he continued, "it's almost like environmentalists and different folks are willing to destroy the environment to protect the environment."

Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), an agency within the Department of Interior, announced the finalization of what is known as a wind energy area (WEA), which is an area of the ocean that would allot for construction of enough wind turbines to produce 32 gigawatts (GW) of energy.

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The agency boasted that, in support of the Biden administration’s goals for deploying 30 GW of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030 and 15 GW of floating offshore wind energy capacity by 2035, the Gulf of Maine WEA surpasses the current state goals for offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine, which is 10 GW for Massachusetts and 3 GW for Maine.

New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA) COO Dustin Delano claimed the industry is getting hit "from every direction" by the Biden administration. (Fox News)

But a coalition of 17 fishing associations – including Delano’s – say the move is "the culmination of a rushed development process that is poorly informed on economic , scientific, environmental and cultural issues of paramount importance."

"The pace has really stepped up to try to get as much done as possible under the current administration," Delano said. "And this massive area is used by hundreds of fishermen across the Gulf of Maine, whether you're from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and even some of the states further south. So it's incredibly problematic when you look at 2 million acres."

Not only do the fishing associations claim that there are "serious questions" about the correlation between endangered whale deaths and wind farms, but the WEA’s project would permanently displace fleets in the prime groundfishing territory.

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"They're talking about these giant, 300-by-300-foot cement bases, with [a] 12, 13-hundred foot turbine that's going to be on top of that with massive anchoring systems, with chains the size of a pickup bed," Delano explained.

"So with every tide change and every wind change," the COO added, "all of that chain is going to be scraping across the bottom and destroying everything in its path."

In a statement to Fox News Digital, BOEM said that the final WEA establishes the boundaries to inform BOEM's initial environmental assessment under NEPA on potential site characterization and assessment activities.

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BOEM also noted that the WEA was finalized "after extensive engagement with lobster fishermen in fishing communities" and avoids certain restricted areas that the National Marine Fisheries Service identified.

"That's part of why we formed the New England Fishermen's Stewardship Association, because there were so many things being thrown at us," Delano reflected. "And as fishermen from different types of fisheries, we really wanted to bring everyone together because these issues that we're facing are larger than just one industry."

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Fox News’ Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.