Just as a GPS navigator needs a destination to tell you the best route to follow, an organization needs to have a presentation plan to determine its objectives and what it must do to achieve them. Developing a presentation plan requires time and work. It is an essential step in moving an organization forward and growing. It is an action program that collects what is intended to be achieved and how to achieve it.
What are the steps in order of the six-step presentation plan?
If in your organization you are at the key moment of developing a presentation plan and you are not very clear on how to start, or what guidelines you should follow, here you will find some keys that will help you develop a presentation plan step by step.
1. Prepare the planning process
Before you start developing your presentation plan, you must first make sure that:
- Be clear about the motivation to do it.
- Check that your organization is ready for this process.
- Involve relevant people.
- Promote planning.
- Organize planning work.
2. Define the ideology
Once the above points have been secured, the next step is to check that the organizational ideology is adequate, and adjust or define it if necessary.
The ideology is composed of:
- Purpose. It is the supreme cause to which the organization aims to contribute. For example, “end hunger in the world.”
- Mission. It is the impact that the organization undertakes to meet its contribution to that purpose. For example, “promoting alternative food production systems in countries below the poverty line.”
- Vision. It is the organization you aspire to be and the place you want to occupy in the environment. For example, “being at the forefront of international collaboration and management models.”
- Values. They are the criteria that indicate how to act and how not to do it. For example, “participation”, “professionalism”, “agility”.
The ideology must have a balance between the aspirational and the realistic. It should encourage striving to improve, and at the same time, serve to generate effects and impacts, not fantasies.
3. Analysis
To achieve the purpose that you have set, you must first know and understand the current situation you find yourself. For this, it is necessary to carry out an analysis at three levels:
Context analysis: Certain “rules of the game condition organizations”. They employ resources produced by others and interact with people who have concerns beyond the organization. Therefore, this analysis must consider changes in the various fields: economic, political, technological, social, and environmental.
Analysis of the environment: It is also necessary to analyze the market in which the organization operates. This analysis covers stakeholders or interest groups and audiences, demand (beneficiaries and sources of funding), competition and image (how our most relevant audiences see us).
Internal analysis: Finally, it will be necessary to determine if our own way of organizing and acting is the most appropriate to achieve what we propose in the short term and sustain ourselves in the medium and long term. The aspects that will be analyzed here are impact creation, strategy, leadership, organization, resources and economic management, people, learning and innovation, and culture and communication.
Once this extensive but necessary analysis has been carried out, you will be able to understand the organization’s strengths and weaknesses in the face of what is proposed. As well as threats in the environment from which you must protect yourself and opportunities you can take advantage of. You can synthesize all the aspects in a matrix that helps to organize the information:
SWOT analysis: It is also very useful to analyze the services, activities, or products that the organization offers, considering the capacity to specify them and the degree to which there is real interest. This analysis will help evaluate if there are services or programs to create, maintain, improve, or eliminate. Based on these considerations, you will be able to identify the presentation priorities: the change projects to be addressed in this period.
4. Strategy
Once the presentation priorities have been chosen, they must be translated into concrete objectives for the plan’s period. The definition of objectives is the critical point of the plan: they are the north that guides all action.
These objectives should be:
- Scheduled
- Relevant
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
Once the objectives have been established, the next step is to define the strategies: propose different possible alternatives, evaluate them and choose the most appropriate ones.
5. Evaluation
Now that you know what you propose and how you will achieve it, you have to create a system that allows you to:
- Check the progress. Continuous performance monitoring measurements to detect deviations and make appropriate corrections.
- Evaluate results. Understand the cause-effect factors that led to success or failure, to draw useful conclusions for future plans.
The system will consist of the indicators, the data that allow us to visualize the achievements, such as the beneficiaries’ satisfaction.
6. An Action plan
With the presentation plan completed, it now needs to be translated into concrete action plans. For each of the objectives, in this phase, we will define:
- The specific actions and processes to be carried out.
- The teams that will participate in the task.
- Those are responsible who will ensure that progress is made on time.
- The supplies and budget that will be needed.
- The dates and deadlines in which it will work.
For this phase, it is advisable to involve the teams’ leaders that will carry out the tasks. On the one hand, because they are the ones who really know the operational capacity. On the other hand, because people are more committed to what we help to decide.
