Let me define first a business plan, in its simplest form, will usually define where you want your business to be within a certain period of time (usually five years) and how you plan on getting there. A business plan is as important for starting a business as blueprints are for building your house. A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
When starting a new business, writing a business plan is an important first step to getting started. A business plan will lay out the direction for the future of your company and begin to establish standards for success. A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections. These projections will assist investors with making decisions about your business and help you to know how much funding you will need to get things rolling.
A business plan should define how you would like to operate your business. This includes describing the management team, the marketing strategy, and the methods in which you will interact with customers. A business plan might project a strategy that reflects the management style of the founders of the business. The definition should be clear but flexible.
Business plans are developed for many purposes. One company might be looking for funding from investors. Another company might be looking for a loan from a bank. Your company might just need to plan out the company’s strategy to make sure it is successful. Whatever the case, every business needs a business plan.
Purpose of the Business Plan
It must operate and, ultimately, succeed or fail. For management or entrepreneurs seeking external support, the plan is the most important sales document that they are ever likely to produce as it could be the key to raising finance etc. Preparation of a comprehensive plan will not guarantee success in raising funds or mobilizing support, but lack of a sound plan will, almost certainly, ensure failure.
Importance of the Business Planning Process
Preparing a satisfactory business plan is a painful but essential exercise. The planning process forces managers or entrepreneurs to understand more clearly what they want to achieve, and how and when they can do it. Even if no external support is needed, a business plan can play a vital role in helping to avoid mistakes or recognize hidden opportunities. It is much easier to fold a sheet of paper than a business.
For many, many entrepreneurs and planners, the process of planning (thinking, discussing, researching and analyzing) is just as, or even more, useful than the final plan. So, even if you don't need a formal plan, think carefully about going through the planning process. It could be enormously beneficial to your business.
Anticipate many weeks of hard work and several drafts of the emerging plan to get the job right. A clearly written and attractively packaged business plan will make it easier to interest possible supporters, investors etc. A well-prepared business plan will demonstrate that the managers or entrepreneurs know the business and that they have thought through its development in terms of products, management, finances, and most importantly, markets and competition.
WHAT is ISP?
• ISP = IS + P
Why Planning is Important?
• Systematic approach in dealing with future uncertainties. It focuses efforts and resources on long-term, general objectives and yet provides a foundation for short-term activities. Provides a framework for action. Planning involves thinking ahead and designing future action.
Definition.
• ISP is the planning of information systems for an organization. Information system planning is assessing the information needs of an organization and defining the systems, databases and technologies that best satisfy those needs.
ISP Key Activities
1. Describing current situation: it includes a listing of the manual and automated processes, listing of manual and automated data, technology inventory and human resources inventory.
2. Describing future situation: includes blueprints of manual and automated processes, blueprints of manual and automated data, technology blueprints and human resources blueprints.
3. Describing scheduling of the project: includes scheduling of manual and automated processes, scheduling of manual and automated data, technology of scheduling and human resources scheduling.
ISP Planning Types
• Top-Down Planning: A generic information systems planning methodology that attempts to gain a broad understanding of the information system needs of the entire organization.
• Bottom-up Planning: generic information systems planning methodology that identifies and defines IS development projects based upon solving operational business problems or taking advantages of some business opportunities.
Components of ISP
• The Process of Information Systems Planning
• Strategic Alignment of Business and IT
• Selecting Systems to Invest In
• Project Management Issues
Why ISP?
Why do we need to plan for IS?
To ensure that IS both complements and assists in the achievement of our business goals.
To ensure that the use of scarce resources are maximized within a business.
To maximize the benefits of changing technology.
To take account of the different viewpoints of business professionals and IT professionals.
Who Perform ISP?
IS Planners / System Analyst
Variety of stakeholders (i.e. sponsor, users)
Top management commitment
successful ISP.
Where & When ISP?
Any organization that has interest in getting the best out of its IT investments.
Facing problems
Grabbing opportunities.
Information Systems (IS) fail to satisfy huge, diverse and complicated information requirements of their users.
HOW?
Look at business structure, function, processes, culture
Look at existing IT
Look at available technology.
Carry out interviews.
Develop policies.
Develop application portfolio.
Plan schedules for migration, implementation etc.
Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.
1. Timely - The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
2. Useable - The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
3. Maintainable - The ISP should be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates; technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
4. Quality - While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
5. Reproducible - The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.
Reference:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~nkm/sisp/CONTENTS.html
http://www.business-plan-success.com/Articles/BusinessPlanDefinition/
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
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