In today’s lightning-fast business world, the old ways of planning are quickly becoming obsolete. Remember when companies used to create an annual budget and stick to it religiously? Those days are gone. Modern businesses need a more flexible, responsive approach to planning—and that’s where agile planning comes in.

In this two-part blog, we’ll be looking at the move from traditional static planning, to dynamic agile planning.  In this first part, we’ll introduce the key concepts of agile planning.  In the second part, we’ll look at some of the main challenges to achieving agile planning and how to overcome them.

The Problem with Traditional Planning

Traditional planning looks something like this: Once a year, senior leadership gets together to define strategic objectives and targets for the coming year.  Finance teams then get to work, hopefully together with leaders across the business, to create a detailed budget that’s supposed to guide the entire organization for the next 12 months. After an extended and often painful process, including multiple iterations, the budget is finalised.  However, before the ink is even dry, the market has already changed and the details in the budget are no longer relevant.

Think about how much can happen in a year (or now, even a quarter!). New and disruptive technologies emerge, customer expectations shift, new competitors appear, economic conditions fluctuate, and unexpected global events (like a pandemic or a regional conflict) can turn entire industries upside down. A static, rigid planning process simply can’t keep up.

What is Agile Planning?

Agile planning is fundamentally different from traditional, annual budgeting. It’s a continuous, dynamic process that allows businesses to:

• Respond quickly to changes
• Make real-time decisions
• Adapt strategies rapidly
• Create multiple scenario plans
• Maintain a forward-looking perspective

Agile planning incorporates two key concepts: continuous planning and scenario planning.  With continuous planning or rolling forecasts, businesses replace infrequent and time-consuming planning cycles with regular, light touch forecast updates based on the latest business and market trends.  While traditional forecasting often assumes that the world will end on the last day of the current financial year, rolling forecasts are always looking further forward beyond the year end, projecting at least 12-24 months into the future.  As each new month begins, the first month of the previous forecast is replaced by actuals and a new forecast month is added to the end.

With scenario planning, rather than simply focusing on a base budget or forecast, business leaders are actively encouraged to consider multiple alternative versions of the future and the impact on the business from each scenario.  These alternative scenarios could include changes to macro-economic factors, changes to existing markets, entry into new markets, alternative investment decisions or changes to organisational structure.

This increase in forecast frequency and creation of alternative scenario versions might initially sound like more work overall. However, in practice, small regular incremental updates to an already relevant recent forecast is a much easier request to the business than a long and disjointed budgeting process building up a detailed plan from scratch over multiple iterations and usually multiple months.

The Benefits of Agile Planning

When done right, agile planning offers tremendous advantages:

• Faster Decision Making: Based on scenario analysis already completed or increased speed in generation of new scenarios, companies can respond to market changes in weeks or days instead of months
• Better Insights: More frequent forecasting using the latest actuals trends, allows for more accurate forecasting 
• Increased Collaboration: Continuous planning helps maintain an ongoing dialogue across the business, breaking down departmental silos and creating a more integrated and consistent approach
• Strategic Flexibility: The ability to model multiple scenarios helps businesses assess and prepare for the impact of potential strategic decisions
• Improved Resource Allocation: Scenario planning allows the business to identify the best investment opportunities for the business, while continuous planning allows resource allocation decisions to be constantly reassessed and revised as required.

While the benefits of agile planning are easy to see, in practice they are harder to achieve.  Catch the second part of this blog post, where we will look at some of these key challenges and how best to overcome them, to unlock the benefits described above.

Revelwood is dedicated to helping the Office of Finance succeed through the strategic use of technology. We have a nearly 30 year history helping CFOs and FP&A leaders modernize and transform the Office of Finance. Our approach is to focus on your success, speak business first and to leverage best-in-class technology that suits your organization’s unique needs. Contact us at info@revelwood.com to start a conversation on how we can help your Office of Finance be thes best it can be.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Hidden Value of Strategic Planning: Gaining Operational Efficiencies

Budgeting That Works: How to Plan for Success in an Uncertain World

10 Steps to Transform Financial Planning & Analysis: A Guide to a Successful FP&A Implementation