Plan, plan and plan again.
With all this talk about the credit crunch, with some banks making money and some banks still losing money, house prices up, house prices down it got me thinking about the need to continuously plan, do and review.
Both at home and at work the need to keep doing this now more than ever, why? Well we live in an ever changing world, at work things change from moment to moment, at home it’s the same because we spend more time at work then we do at home it naturally feeds from one to the other.
I’ll give you an example both my wife and I are self employed and my wife’s contract comes to an end in 2 months time so last weekend we decided to do a review of our finances and applied a “just in case” scenario and this covered things like:
· contract does not get renewed
· unable to find another contract
· fall ill and unable to work for 6 months
Did we have enough to make sure we could get through and the answer was Not Enough!
Just to give you some background we are pretty good at planning our finances and the last time we reviewed them was back in March. The interesting thing was having reviewed it last week we were still able to slash 20% off our monthly budget to go towards our “just in case” fund. So for example we have declared the month of August as a “no spend” month apart from essentials, did we need to have a glass of wine every night with our meal-but we can have a glass with our meal at the weekend. Cook meals at the weekend that can act as leftovers during the week-a curry a few days later are soo much nicer – if you ask nicely I will email you the recipe. Now we are spending all of August at home we have made a list of the things we were going to sort out around the house that have been in storage in the attic and will put any good stuff on ebay or gumtree and sell them.
So how does this relate to business-well it’s a good opportunity to look at your plans more regularly rather than leaving them., have you thought about all the “just in case” scenarios so that you, your team, department or business are as prepared as possible.
Good luck with your planning, doing and reviewing and let us know how you are getting on.
Dilesh
Some useful websites:
It’s always good to do scenario planning with any initiative you are undertaking. Of course that still leaves room for debate, as the climate change issue proves. Despite having several scenarios created countries still debate how best to respond.