Golden Circle of Planning helps organizations understand and execute core elements of planning. It enables them to take the necessary actions to build agile and effective enterprise planning processes.

Enterprise Planning plays a significant role in driving the performance of an organization. It helps organizations unify their planning processes across functions. This enables them to achieve strategic business goals and objectives with insight-based decisions.

 However, Enterprise Planning processes can deliver results only if they address the core elements of planning.

So, what are the core aspects of planning an organization should focus on?

How does the ‘Golden Circle of Planning’ help them?

Before going into these pertinent questions, let us first understand,

The Golden Circle

The golden circle concept is proposed by Simon Sinek in his book/ted talk, “start with why‘. This approach deals with three critical aspects of ‘WHY’, ‘HOW’ and ‘WHAT’ of creating unique value propositions for organizations.

The same concept can deliver robust enterprise planning processes when used in planning.

Golden Circle of Planning

The golden circle of planning helps organizations address the WHY, HOW, and WHAT of planning processes. 

Let us understand what each of these stages means.

WHY – In this stage, organizations and business owners understand the need for business planning and its significance. In other words, they need to comprehend Why planning is done in an enterprise and what is its purpose. 

HOW – Once the need for business planning is felt and recognized, the next step is ‘How’. It deals with how to effectively define the planning processes to meet the real needs of planning.

WHAT – The final stage involves operationalizing the planning processes. It deals with all the activities required to establish the planning system in the organization.

Hence, whether it is a large or small business, it should address all these critical planning components to achieve its goals. 

So how can an organization in this rapidly evolving business world address these aspects?

Are there any tools or software that help businesses focus on these areas while planning?

Yes. There are various sophisticated and advanced software that can help in this area. These software help organizations establish a robust planning system with great data collection, data aggregation, and analytics capabilities. But the majority of them address only the ‘WHAT’ stage of the golden circle with little focus on other stages. A robust planning system is no doubt important for generating actionable insights from the cross-functional data. But it may not be effective if the direction and objectives of planning are not correctly defined. 

How does an organization efficiently address these core aspects of ‘WHY’ and ‘WHAT’ of planning?

The answer to this question is JustPerform.

JustPerform is a new generation, intelligent Corporate Performance Management (CPM) cloud platform. It guides enterprises and organisations in business planning, consolidation, and performance monitoring. It helps them analyse the results that matter, discover insights, and plan for success. Unlike other vendors, JustPerform focuses on letting business users at all levels drive CPM activities, empowering them with an intuitive interface and industry best practices.

This unified platform empowers organizations to deal with these critical areas of the ‘Golden circle of planning’.

How JustPerform addresses these core facets?

WHY

The key reason for planning in an organization is to identify the metrics that drive performance. As mentioned earlier, this is the real purpose of planning in an enterprise. JustPerform provides the management team with insights into key business metrics. It empowers them to establish the right metrics that drive business performance.

HOW

JustPerform contains the value driver tree to help business users visually define the key business metrics. The vale driver tree is made of planning infoblocks where business users can define their metrics and their underlying drivers using simple arithmetic formulae. These visual tools in JustPerform enable business users to link business metrics to an end outcome easily. They can be defined at various levels that are relevant for business performance analysis.

Moreover, the business reference models available in JustPerform provide industry best practices to build accurate metrics.

WHAT

Once the business metrics and drivers are defined, the next step is to deploy these metrics. These metrics are deployed and the necessary details are. The details include the people responsible for submitting the data and the data source to collect the data from. JustPerform automates this entire deployment with its machine learning algorithms and performs it in real-time.

In this way, JustPerform addresses the ‘WHY’ and ‘HOW’ of the planning that is not addressed by other planning software.

Planning can bring agility and competitive advantage to an organization provided it is done the right way. The ‘Golden Circle of Planning’ helps organizations confront the ever-changing business landscape with effective planning processes