2021 Planning: Bits and Pieces
Last week we talked about motivating people behind the vision of wanting to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Which is all well and good. Very important stuff. It’s got to be done to get the people excited. Yet, the real work has just begun. Big bold journeys don’t just take off themselves. You’ve got to find a way to assemble your moon bound ship with parts and people.
How do you do that?
In the most fundamentally basic ways, there are really two types of measurement functions one can illustrate for any particular job to be done:
1.) Time spent to do the job (Operations, Customer Support, Finance etc.)
2.) Output generated from the job (Sales, Engineering, Recruiting etc.)
1.) Time spent to do the job
Get a good feel for all of the different activities individuals on a team spend their time doing and how long it takes them to do those activities. 25% of it could be sitting in meetings (ouch). 25% could be manually repeating a process that hasn’t been automated yet. And so on.
- Find out how that varies for a team over a given day, week, month or quarter
- Measure what 50%, 75%, 100%, and 125% capacity looks like. Don’t you dare model 150%..
- Try to rank those activities in terms of importance and the highest leverage use of their time
- Next, play out an exercise of how that is likely to change over the coming year
- Are there product improvements that could change the mix of time spent?
- How much time is spent on activities that help the business grow?
- Which activities sop up administrative bandwidth?
Either way, a rock solid bottoms up feel for what each person can drive from a people hour and activity hour standpoint give any good leader a really good feel for what’s possible from a time perspective and the potential shifts therein.
2.) Output generated from the job
Some roles are much more outcome driven and should be measured as such. Sales would be a great example. Any sales plan needs to be built on the most specific possible assumptions. Sales drives revenue, revenue drives cash generated, and cash flow drives business value. Sales is life? Anyway, on to the output generated examples:
- Sales measured against the # of deals a rep closes
- How many phone calls be made or e-mails sent by a sales rep in given period of time?
- How many of those, approximately, will convert into a new customer?
- What variance do you see across a team of reps to find a safe assumptive average?
- Marketing against the # of leads they generate
- How much does an individual lead cost?
- When do they, on average, convert into sales qualified opportunities?
- What’s the overhead of managing different acquisition channels?
Here the biggest components are centered around how many resources you need to drive an aggregate output, how solid is that assumption, and how much money must be spent in people & tools to accomplish the goal.
Any good plan needs to be built on the smallest of assumptions. Then, they can all be rolled up into the aggregate budgets and headcount needed to deliver the plan. The bits and pieces make the meal!
Ultimately the business value delivered up on high is built in the trenches by new sales, existing customer expansion, creating new opportunities, and building world changing products. It all wraps up in a function of execution within a given unit of time. Best laid plans are built from understanding the value of a team’s time and outputs…coupled with some good old fashioned effort.