Top down and bottom up planning

In a previous article I talked about how to breakdown the strategy top down into a handful of organisational objectives and outcomes/key results: https://acrbrooke.blogspot.com/2023/02/strategy-breakdown.html. This is a key activity to undertake in order to provide a clear articulation of ‘why’, it is the direction and line of sight from what is being asked of your people to the organisations purpose and future, but it can’t all be top down, or the teams will feel disempowered and you’ll end up missing some great ideas. 

There are many ways to bring together top down direction setting and bottom up idea generation and solution development, so here is just one way you could go about it: 

1. Draw out you most common customer journey, from first touch point to last. 
2. At each step in the journey add the performance of relevant key metrics, such as customer satisfaction, number of complaints, financial gain, conversation/loss, quality etc., whatever is most relevant to your organisation. 
3. With representatives from each function, customer facing and supporting functions, draw out all the activities and processes they undertake in relation to each step in the customer journey, linking these together from one function to another. 
4. Once mapped, ensuring that everyone has taken the time to understand the whole picture, to help prevent siloed thinking and help position everyone in the big picture. 
5. Take the top down objectives one at a time, and with the key outcomes front of mind, step through the journey and highlight where processes, activities and touch points need to change to meet those outcomes. 
6. For each point you identify try and quantify what impact a change will have on the performance metrics you have identified as well as the objective outcomes, so the cascade of impact is understood. 

You may then want to repeat this for your most difficult customer journey, the most under utilised, etc. 

Regardless of what approach you like to take, always remember that there must be a clear link from activity to the achievement of the objectives and outcomes defined, and those that contribute the most should be the priority, after all, you can’t do it all at once. 

How do you approach planning?