The Business Planning Process

As a business manager, planning is an ongoing effort. That is, you should be assessing the external environment, analyzing where you are relative to where you want to be, and making sure you are on a path to achieve your goals. It is very important to note that the process of developing a business plan may or may not lead to a written business plan. Periodically, however, you should undertake a structured, thorough business planning process that leads to a written business plan. Where appropriate, we will point out those bits of information that are relevant to the written business plan. In general, we will focus on the planning process, which contains four major steps;

1. Developing your mission,
2. Performing situation analysis,
3. Defining goals and objectives, and
4. Establishing strategies.

Often, the analogy of planning a journey is used to describe the business planning process. In that analogy, the business's mission is the reason for undertaking the journey. The situation analysis defines your starting point. Goals and objectives, on the other hand, define your anticipated destinations. Finally, strategies define how you plan to get from your starting point to your destinations. The following sections describe these in further detail, providing information about how the Internet can play a role in each of the steps.