Will AI change your business planning process?

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Let’s look at how Copilot can assist you in an active working VisPlan plan:

Set up relevant actions quicker with Copilot

For example; Ask Copilot to help you with regularly occurring marketing actions that are both frequent and generalizable. 

1. Select your Ambition

In the plan, select the desired Ambition for marketing campaigns. With assistance from VisPlan Copilot, start asking Copilot for relevant actions:

Selected ambitions

2. Ask Copilot to construct common campaign actions

Copilot prompt

By typing the following into the assistant:
“Develop campaign actions to communicate the E-Bike unique features and functions for the social media market“, the assistant will give you four (4) new proposed Actions to Apply or Reject to the plan.

3. Your actions are created

Apply actions

Copilot assists you to develop Actions for the Operational Plan – Ready to execute!

The immediate savings are applied to;

  • Lead time
  • ROI in this particular case
  • Basic actions and tasks nicely formatted into your Winning Aspiration Plan.

To see VisPlan in action, watch our detailed E-Bike video. It’s a great way to get familiar with the features and capabilities.

If you have any questions or need assistance getting started, feel free to reach out to us directly. 

Looking forward to seeing the amazing plans you’ll create with VisPlan!

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Planning with Digital Speed: 3 Steps for a Winning Aspiration Plan

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1. Begin with the plan purpose – Position – always!

Focus and position

A clear and concise Position Statement sets the foundation for your entire plan. It ensures everyone involved understands the core purpose and direction. This statement should be easy to remember and recite, written in active present tense, and free from quantifiable or qualitative measures. 

2. Identify the critical Capabilities or Functions

Capabilities and functions

Focus your efforts on what truly matters. By pinpointing these key areas, you can allocate resources effectively and ensure that your plan addresses the most critical aspects of your strategy. For example, in our E-Bike plan, we focus on five key lines of operations.

3. Execute by Sprints or Focuses

Dividing your plan into manageable business Focuses or Sprints helps in organizing and prioritizing actions over specific time periods such as months or quarters. Each focus acts as a time divider, associating actions with a defined date period. By using the focus filter, you can visually highlight where actions are placed for different focuses. 

To see VisPlan in action, watch our detailed E-Bike video. It’s a great way to get familiar with the features and capabilities.

If you have any questions or need assistance getting started, feel free to reach out to me directly. 

Looking forward to seeing the amazing plans you’ll create with VisPlan!

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Microsoft Copilot Logo

How to create a visual business plan in 20 seconds

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VisPlan Create plan with Copilot step 1

1. Open VisPlan Copilot 

Start the Plan Configuration Wizard and choose “Create new VisPlan”, click next, and then select “VisPlan Copilot”.

VisPlan Create plan with Copilot step 2

2. Describe your plan

Enter your prompt, preferably with VisPlan guiding principles: defining what you expect as “Capabilities”, “Ambitions” and “Position”.

VisPlan Create plan with Copilot step 3

3. Complete the wizard

Press Configure, and your plan will be made.

The first version of your plan is made within 20 seconds!

VisPlan Create plan with Copilot result

This is the prompt we used in this example, feel free to tweak and use it in your own project:

Create a strategy plan with three Capabilities named "Scope 1 - direct emissions", "Scope 2 - Energy needed for our operations" and "Scope 3 - All products in use". For each Capability line identify My Business specific Ambitions and descriptions. Also define the Position Statement accordingly to My Business objectives.

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VisPlan Alignment Loop

The VisPlan Alignment Loop

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Information and people need to align. Many organizations still rely on creating snapshot analyses and discrete PowerPoint presentations for meetings each time. This results in wasted time in monthly or quarterly preparations and a lack of alignment in between.

What is needed is continuous alignment between information and people throughout:

1. Formulate Strategy
2. Align and Implement
3. Execute, Adapt, and Iterate

VisPlan is designed to be your common information model and visual representation throughout these three stages, keeping everyone aligned on an ongoing basis without dependence on document production, resulting in more efficient meetings.

1. Formulate Strategy

Create a Winning Strategy with VisPlan – Discover Your Desired Position and Goals

In the competitive business landscape, a winning strategy is essential for achieving success. VisPlan helps you identify and visualize the critical capabilities that need to be developed through a set of focuses in order for you to reach your desired position and objectives.

Create a VisPlan by adding objects to the diagram
Define a Position and Objectives to accomplish
1. Formulate Strategy
2. Align & Implement

2. Align and Implement

To achieve your business goals, you need to align and implement a governance model, priorities, programs, and plans. With VisPlan, you’ll have access to a powerful and user-friendly interface that enables you to connect your OKRs with your resourced capabilities.

Our platform is designed to streamline your workflow, making it easy to stay on track and communicate everything with a common language and information model.

Create Key Results for each Objective
Validate your plan’s Ambitions and Actions impact on the Objectives

3. Execute, Adapt and Iterate

Review, measure, and discover insights from OKRs.

At VisPlan, we understand the importance of being agile in today’s rapidly changing business landscape.

That’s why our platform enables you to execute, adapt, and iterate your plan as needed to ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

VisPlan helps everyone to be focused and aligned on “Where to go” and “How are we doing?”

Don’t let your competition get ahead – Try VisPlan today and start creating a winning strategy!

Execute the plan and track the Progress of Actions and KPIs.
Analyze how the result of the Key Results vs. the targets
Analyze how the KPI performs against the Key Result
Gantt view shows the Actions' progress and placement in time
3.Execute, Adapt and Iterate
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Navigating Success: The Crucial Role of Strategic Planning

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In today’s dynamic business landscape, strategic planning is not just a luxury but a necessity for long-term success. Whether you’re a startup looking to carve out your niche or an established enterprise seeking to maintain your competitive edge, strategic planning lays the groundwork for achieving your business objectives. Let’s delve into why strategic planning matters and how leveraging a visual planning tool like VisPlan can streamline the process.

1. Defining Your Strategic Position

Strategic planning begins with defining your organization’s strategic position – where you want to be in the market and how you intend to differentiate yourself from competitors. This involves analyzing your competitive landscape, identifying market opportunities, and articulating your unique value proposition. To effectively define your strategic position:

  • Conduct Market Analysis: Assess market trends, customer needs, and competitive dynamics to identify opportunities for growth and differentiation. Understand your target market and how your products or services meet their needs better than competitors.
  • Define Your Unique Value Proposition: Articulate what sets your organization apart from competitors and why customers should choose your offerings over alternatives. Focus on your strengths, capabilities, and areas of competitive advantage.
  • Identify Strategic Priorities: Determine the key areas where you need to excel to achieve your strategic objectives. Prioritize initiatives that align with your strategic position and have the greatest potential to drive value for your organization.

2. Anticipating Change and Mitigating Risks

In today’s fast-paced business environment, change is inevitable. Strategic planning allows you to anticipate potential disruptions and proactively mitigate risks. By conducting thorough market analysis and scenario planning, you can identify emerging trends, competitive threats, and regulatory changes that may impact your business. To effectively anticipate change and mitigate risks:

  • Conduct Scenario Planning: Develop alternative scenarios and contingency plans to prepare for various future outcomes. Anticipate best-case, worst-case, and most likely scenarios to mitigate risks and capitalize on opportunities.
  • Monitor Market Trends: Stay abreast of market trends, technological advancements, and regulatory changes that may impact your industry. Continuously scan the external environment for potential threats and opportunities that may affect your strategic position.
  • Build Organizational Resilience: Foster a culture of adaptability and resilience within your organization. Encourage innovation, flexibility, and agility to respond effectively to changing market conditions and unexpected challenges.

3. Execution Excellence

Execution is where strategy meets reality. Even the best-laid plans are worthless without effective execution. Strategic planning helps translate vision into action by aligning resources, prioritizing initiatives, and monitoring progress towards strategic objectives. To achieve execution excellence:

  • Align Resources with Strategic Priorities: Allocate resources strategically to support initiatives that align with your strategic position and have the greatest potential to drive value. Ensure that resources are deployed efficiently and effectively to maximize impact.
  • Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define measurable KPIs to track progress towards your strategic objectives. Establish clear metrics and targets to monitor performance and ensure accountability at all levels of the organization.
  • Iterate and Adapt: Continuously evaluate and adjust your strategies based on performance feedback and changing market conditions. Be willing to course-correct and pivot as needed to stay on course towards your strategic goals.

Conclusion

In conclusion, strategic planning is essential for organizations looking to thrive in today’s dynamic and competitive business environment. By defining your strategic position, anticipating change, and executing with excellence, you can chart a course towards long-term success. Leverage visual planning tools like VisPlan to streamline the strategic planning process, foster alignment, and drive execution excellence. Start your strategic planning journey today and position your organization for sustained growth and competitiveness.

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Revolutionize Your Change Management: How VisPlan Can Help Your Organization Thrive in Times of Change

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Change is inevitable, and organizations that can adapt quickly and effectively are more likely to thrive in today’s fast-paced business environment. But how do you navigate change to ensure your organization’s continued success? The answer lies in strategic planning for change management.

Strategic Planning for Change Management

Strategic planning for change management involves identifying and evaluating opportunities for change, developing an implementation plan, and executing it to minimize disruption and maximize success. By taking a strategic approach, organizations align changes with their overall goals and objectives, ensuring they have the necessary resources and support.

Benefits of Strategic Planning for Change Management

  1. Proactive Approach: Strategic planning allows organizations to anticipate and prepare for changes before they happen. By identifying potential changes and having a plan in place, disruptions are minimized, and opportunities can be seized.
  2. Agility: Having a change management plan makes organizations more agile. They can respond quickly and effectively to new challenges and opportunities, staying competitive in today’s business landscape.

Introducing VisPlan

If you’re struggling to track progress and OKRs during execution, consider using VisPlan. It’s a visual planning tool designed to create graphical strategic plans and monitor progress. Here’s how VisPlan can benefit your organization:

  1. Create Winning Strategies: VisPlan helps you identify critical capabilities needed to reach your desired position and objectives. Visualize these focuses to develop a winning strategy.
  2. Align and Implement: Connect OKRs with resourced capabilities using VisPlan’s user-friendly interface. Streamline workflows, communicate with a common language, and stay on track.
  3. Execute, Adapt, and Iterate: VisPlan enables agility. Review, measure, and iterate your plan as needed to stay ahead of the curve.

Conclusion

Strategic planning for change management is essential for organizational success. With VisPlan, whether you’re a small business, non-profit, or large corporation, you can stay organized, focused, and motivated. Don’t let change catch you off guard—take control with VisPlan!

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SMART Criteria for Effective Strategic Planning

Utilizing the SMART Criteria with VisPlan: Streamlining Visual Strategic Planning

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In this article, we will explore how VisPlan, a powerful visual planning tool, can enhance the implementation of the SMART criteria.

By leveraging VisPlan’s capabilities, organizations can develop strategic plans that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, leading to better outcomes. 

Specific

VisPlan facilitates the creation of specific objectives by providing a platform to define a Position Statement, the overarching goal or position that an organization aims to achieve with its strategic plan.

By visualizing this Position Statement, stakeholders gain a clear understanding of the organization’s desired destination and can align their efforts accordingly.

Within VisPlan, organizations can break down the Position Statement into specific Strategic Objectives, each representing a key aspect of the overall goal. These objectives can be articulated with precision and linked to the organization’s long-term vision.

To develop specific objectives, it is essential to answer the “Five Ws” – Who, What, When, Where, and Why. 

For example, instead of stating a vague goal like “increase sales,” a specific objective would be “increase quarterly sales by 15% in the Western region by implementing targeted marketing campaigns.”

Measurable

Measuring progress is crucial for evaluating the success of a strategic plan. VisPlan enables organizations to associate Key Results with each Strategic Objective. Key Results represent measurable outcomes that indicate progress towards achieving the Strategic Objectives.

VisPlan provides the ability to define relevant metrics using Key Result. By visualizing these metrics, organizations can track and analyze their performance, making informed decisions based on real-time data.

For instance, if the goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, a measurable objective could be “improve customer satisfaction ratings to 90% in the next six months through post-purchase surveys.”

Attainable

While it is essential to set ambitious goals, they must also be attainable. Objectives that are too far-fetched or unrealistic can lead to demotivation and hinder progress. Organizations must evaluate their resources, capabilities, and constraints when setting achievable goals.

To ensure goals are attainable, organizations should conduct a thorough analysis of their internal and external factors, including available resources, market conditions, and competitive landscape. By aligning goals with the organization’s capacity, it becomes more feasible to develop strategies and action plans that can realistically deliver the desired outcomes.

Relevant

Relevance is critical for maintaining focus and ensuring that strategic objectives contribute to the overall success of the organization. Objectives should align with the organization’s mission, vision, and values, as well as address significant challenges or opportunities in the marketplace.

To establish relevant objectives, organizations should assess the strategic importance of each goal and its potential impact on the organization’s success. Objectives that are directly linked to the organization’s core competencies and long-term sustainability will have a higher likelihood of driving meaningful results.

Time-bound

Setting deadlines or timeframes for achieving objectives creates a sense of urgency and accountability within the organization. Time-bound goals provide a clear timeline for action and enable organizations to monitor progress effectively.

When setting time-bound objectives, it is crucial to establish realistic deadlines that consider the complexity of the task, available resources, and external factors. Breaking down long-term objectives into short-term milestones can help track progress and ensure timely adjustments if necessary.

Conclusion:

Developing a strategic plan that adheres to the SMART criteria empowers organizations to set clear objectives, monitor progress, and make data-driven decisions.

By focusing on specificity, measurability, achievability, relevance, and time-bound targets, organizations can increase the effectiveness of their strategic planning efforts.

Embracing the SMART criteria as a guiding framework ensures that strategic plans are aligned with the organization’s vision and provide a roadmap for success in today’s dynamic business landscape.

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Boost Your Strategy: How Graphical Strategic Planning Can Help Achieve Success

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Clarity in Communication

One of the key advantages of using graphical strategic planning is that it helps to improve clarity. Using visual elements such as flowcharts, mind maps, and infographics, organizations can communicate complex information in a simple and easy-to-understand format. This makes it easy for everyone in the organization, from top-level executives to front-line employees, to understand the plan and their role in achieving it.

Collaboration and Co-Creation

Graphical strategic planning also helps to promote collaboration and co-creation. By involving team members in the planning process, organizations can build buy-in and ownership of the plan among team members. This also allows for a more diverse set of perspectives and ideas to be incorporated into the plan, which can lead to more effective and innovative strategies.

Flexibility for Adaptation

The flexibility of graphical strategic planning is another major advantage. Visual plans are easy to update and adapt as circumstances change, which allows organizations to respond quickly to new challenges and opportunities. This flexibility can also help organizations to adjust their strategies and tactics as needed to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Accountability for Progress

Another key benefit of using graphical strategic planning is that it helps to improve accountability. By using clear, measurable goals and objectives, organizations can hold themselves and their teams accountable for achieving the plan’s objectives. This helps to ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals, and it can help organizations to achieve their objectives more effectively and efficiently.

Engagement for Motivation

Finally, graphical strategic planning can help to engage and motivate employees by showing them how their work contributes to the organization’s overall goals. By providing employees with a clear understanding of how their work fits into the organization’s mission and vision, they can better understand the bigger picture and be more motivated to achieve success.

Conclusion

In conclusion, using graphical strategic planning can be a powerful tool for organizations looking to boost their strategies and achieve success. It helps to improve clarity, collaboration, flexibility, accountability and engagement, and can be a great way to ensure that everyone in the organization is aligned and working towards the same goals. Organizations that adopt this approach can achieve their objectives more effectively and efficiently, and stay competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment.

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VisPlan Teams Meeting

Make sure your business is transparent and visually aligned

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We communicate and work in Teams, Zoom and Slack – share screens within all types of modern digital meeting rooms. One implication of this is that it is getting harder and harder to get your arms around the organization with the spread of functions and people outside the traditional office workspace.  

Just recall the recent headline from Elon Musk, about his frustration that he cannot control all his workforce and demand them to show up in office.  

We need to align all business disciplines in a digital way to coordinate work across the organization. What if you can represent your organization by functions, lines of business and its capabilities with the what’s and the how’s the workforce is conducting their daily operations on a one-page visual representation? 

sub plan hierarchy
Each line in the Master Plan has its own Sub Plan

VisPlan visualizes your organization in its context whether it is a corporation with divisions, business areas or programs aligned with the content of the What’s and How’s.

VisPlan has a visual graphical representation that is not unique but rather a representation that most of us recognize and can relate to. What is unique though, is that the same structure has a built-in method that is generic and guides you in any type of business, gov. agency, personal plan, or industry to match your objectives and initiatives.

You can map and align your organization from the top or from the bottom and build your way up or even map completely independent “islands” just to connect them all to a fully aligned master plan with linked sub-plans.

The key thing here is the horizontal lines! Each line can be identified as a line of business, company function or at best as a business capability. And the boxes on the lines hold the collective Ambition Initiatives that contain related Actions for the execution of all the linked plans.

Please review the corporate Big Bank example and its separate business areas and how it breaks down below. Each line is assigned as a function or a division, but all connected with a logical sub-plan breakdown that allows information to trickle down and at the same time aggregate data upwards.

Master Plan to Sub Plan
The Capability Line Retail Banking has a Subplan. The Ambitions (boxes) become the Capability Lines in the Retail Bank Sub Plan

Don’t hesitate to let us assist you in mapping out and visualizing your digital organization structure in VisPlan. 

Please book for a free consultation in our calendar! 

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Working with Capabilities and Ambitions

Working with Capabilities and Ambitions

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Our How to work with Capabilities and Ambitions guide will help you to get a better insight in how to define and improve your capabilities and ambitions in an existing plan.

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