Your company's annual planning meetings are coming up fast. Do you view them as empty exercises that are unrelated to reality, or part of a valuable process that can put your organization on a more profitable path? The yearly budget and strategy planning process should be a time for revisiting and re-thinking initiatives and making important course adjustments to maximize the organization's growth and future success.
That's the advice of business planning experts Jeanne Urich, managing director of Service Performance Insight(opens in new tab), a professional services research and consulting firm; and Richard Curzi, vice president of operations at Collaborative Consulting, an IT management consulting firm. The two of them will be presenting the webinar Business Planning: Empty Ritual or Catalyst for Growth(opens in new tab) for professional services organizations (PSO) on Wednesday, August 28.
Urich and Curzi will provide several key guidelines for optimizing the value of PSO’s planning process. One important one: Avoid wasting a lot of time (and employee morale) hashing out last year's failures. Instead, spend that time and energy for evaluating corporate strengths and weaknesses, with the aim of creating specific initiatives and
updating performance metrics to better gauge the success of those initiatives throughout the year.
Other common mistakes companies make in their yearly planning cycle include:
- unclear strategies that are difficult to translate into specific programs and processes.
- a silo-based organizational structure that locks employees into territorial thinking and prevents development of a cross-enterprise vision.
- too little of a particular skills set in the company to successfully execute a strategy.
Urich and Curzi will show professional services firms how to optimize the value of the annual
planning process and how to leverage NetSuite's cloud-based Services Resource Planning to better support and execute corporate strategies.
To register for the webinar, click here.(opens in new tab)
-Ed Marshall, SVP, GM Services Vertical