Since business has been on my mind so much, here I am again. This time it’s refining down the plan to a single year. Now, first the time, this started to get easier for me. It’s much easier to think in terms of a one year plan, than 10 or even 3. why? because for me, one year is something I personally could envision. And that makes it even more exciting. Again, we take the major pieces of the business and figure out where we need them to be in order to achieve the 3 year plan. We don’t even need to think about the 10 year plan, because now we’re focused on getting to the 3 year milestones. If we envisioned that properly, it’ll put us exactly where we need to be.
Now, the tricky part with the one plan is figuring out where you need to be… not just where you’re going? So for example, if you plan to hit $500,000 in sales, but you are currently at $50,000, what are you going to do to increase sales 10 times? is it even remotely possible? because you may completely missed reality when you did the 3 & 10 year plans. When you stop to realistically look at what you can in a year… well, let’s just say you might need to rework those long term plans a bit. It also forces you to be creative.
For example, you need to start thinking strategically. I mentioned in a previous post that within 3 years I wanted a client independent platform for service. Well, in order to do that, I need to my roadmap this year. I need to figure out, at a high level, what do I want to provide. Am I developing an entire database structure with the screens to support it? how deep do I go into the financial side? how much is done using web? using mobile devices? cloud? and as soon as I started asking myself those questions, I realized there are a LOT of things I don’t know. I don’t know much about cloud, if I don’t design in ABAP, what language should be I using to design a simple platform? how much do I include in the process? and on and on…
When you begin looking at the big picture, it becomes clear what you need to focus on right now. You won’t have answers to everything, but for me, my goal became to start finding people that understood the concepts and figure out what it will take to get me there. How about you? what’s your one year plan look like? Mine was a lot more learning than I expected, but it got me excited again, because I’m starting see the vision… 🙂
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike