Devising an Operational Plan for Your Business
What is an operational plan? Factors & Elements involved in an Operational Business Plan.
While strategic business planning gives you the objectives, direction and hypothetical prospect of your business, an operational planning will give you a more practical approach towards selling your software product. An operational plan describes the everyday workflow of the product development, how and when to perform specific process, and more.
In simple words, operational planning is the process of converting your product/business goals into an execution plan. It describes everything from the internal development operations to the external marketing planning.
An operational plan must be able to give answers to these four questions:Where’s our product at present? What should be our next course of action? How to perform that task? How can we measure our progress?
4 Key Factors of a Complete Operational Plan
1. Required Human Resource — An operational plan must contain the details about the required skill set and efficient staffs for working on the product development. It should explain in detail, the roles and responsibilities of each team and the employees under it.
2. Financial/Resource Requirements — The capital requirements for building and testing your product, required resources, and other highly essential business requirements must be added to the operational plan. It should also contain the current financial sources, potential sources of funding, and more.
3. Risk evaluation/management — Analyze the risk associated with your software product. Explore the risk associated with building the product, like malfunctions in software; business risks, like competition, losing the market value; and more.
4. Estimated timeline — How long is it going to take for entire software product development? If you’re planning to exit the project at one stage, when will you do that? How long will you be working on the development? Is it continuous development or you’ll stall at one stage?
Now you know what and how to build your software product? Imagine you’ve actually built one and release its first version in the business market. Now what will be your responsibility?
Of course, you’re doing a great job with your product. But, you can’t stop there and call yourself a successful business owner! You need to understand the business economy, your users’ requirements, and must start improving your product to stay on the race.
You must start working towards promoting your product, increasing its market value, gaining new customers while holding back the existing ones, improve the quality and add new features to your product, and more to turn your software project into a successful business.
To read the complete start-up guide, check out our e-book, “The Definitive Guide To Building Your Own Innovative Software Product”
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