Departments often become isolated from each other within the same company. Even though they are on the same team, it’s common for them to compete for resources and priorities. This book explains how Interdepartmental Planning can turn a siloed mentality into enterprise-oriented thinking. It reveals a system for enabling departments to work together to set priorities and focus resources on the initiatives that bring the greatest good to the entire company. Practical application questions help you apply the principles to your own business.
Free Workbook Included!
The Interdepartmental Planning Workbook is a free tool that will help you get the most out of the Interdepartmental Planning book. A link to download the workbook can be found inside the book. The workbook includes space to take notes as well as room to record your responses to the application questions found at the end of each chapter.
Take a Look Inside
Each chapter addresses a topic related to Interdepartmental Planning. The chapter begins with an explanation of the principle that is involved and follows with examples of what it looks like when the principle is applied to a business. At the end of each chapter there is an application section with questions that will help you apply the principle to your business.
“Matthew writes in an easily relatable style using examples that any business leader can envision in their own business. I highly recommend this book and others in the series.”
An Overview of the Interdepartmental Planning Guidebook
As organizations grow and departments form, it’s natural for some degree of isolation to occur between those departments. For the company to flourish, however, it’s critical that they work together, including developing shared priorities. Interdepartmental Planning encourages the organization to abandon a silo mentality and embrace enterprise thinking. It is the key to allocating resources to the right initiatives so the entire company benefits. Below is an overview of the major concepts that inform Interdepartmental Planning. For more details, including illustrative examples, get a copy of the book.
Enterprise Thinking
A business becomes an enterprise as it grows and organizes into functional teams and departments. Although a necessary process, it’s common for departments to become silos—isolated groups that aren’t aware of, or concerned with, how they work together.
This natural tendency to focus on the immediate needs of one’s department can work against the success of the enterprise. Enterprise Thinking is when the leaders, managers, and staff move away from thinking only in “function-centric” terms and instead show concern for and deference to the entire organization.
As part of embracing Enterprise Thinking, Department heads should consider what it means to be a good supplier to internal customers and a good customer to internal suppliers. These interdependencies are core to how the enterprise must function to be successful.
Interdepartmental Planning Process
There are four steps to Interdepartmental Planning:
Step 1 – Department Initiatives Identification
Each department begins by identifying initiatives that are important to its functional areas. They should align with the department’s mission and fall within one-to-two years in the future.Step 2 – Cross-Functional Teams Prioritization
Members of the management and leadership teams form cross-functional teams to prioritize the list of department initiatives, embracing an Enterprise Mindset.Step 3 – Organizational Prioritization
Management and leadership teams come together as a single group to finalize the prioritization of initiatives, staying in alignment with the company’s Strategic Plan, Brand & Core Values, Mission, and Vision.Step 4 – Operational Plan
In the fourth and final step, the management and leadership teams organize the initiatives previously selected to form the Operational Plan.
These steps are repeated at the end of each year, with quarterly review along the way to confirm priorities have not changed and to gauge progress.
Initiative Principles
Initiatives fall outside of the normal day-to-day activities of an organization. They do not include routine procedures such as paying bills or manufacturing a core product. Activities such as those are assumed to be covered by resources already in place and do not require organizational change.
Initiatives are desired outcomes for the organization that are both actionable and specific. Initiatives focus on the what; they are not focused on details of how. A shared structure for the Initiative Name will enhance the comparison process by summarizing the key components of the description and the goal. An example of a simple naming structure is to begin with the Action, followed by the Object, and concluding with the Goal.
Initiative Alignment
As leadership and management teams consider which initiatives should be included in the organization’s Operational Plan, it’s important to remember that the Operational Plan is just a piece of the larger journey the enterprise is undertaking. The Operational Plan should be the execution-focused component that lays out what an organization needs to do over the upcoming year or two to achieve progress towards long-term goals.
Participants of Interdepartmental Planning should be in tune with the guiding structures of the organization, such as: Vision & Mission, Brand & Core Values, and Strategic Plan. These guide rails help keep the organization on track to achieve its purpose. Misalignment with these guiding structures can result in activity (energy, time, and money spent) without any real advancement.
Initiative Interdependencies
There are three primary types of interdependencies between initiatives: Ordinal, Additive, and Alternate.
Ordinal interdependencies occur when the nature of two or more initiatives has a required order to them.
Additive interdependences occur when two or more initiatives are contributing to the same goal.
Alternate interdependences occur when two or more initiatives have a relationship in which doing one negates the need to do the other.
During the initiative prioritization step of Interdepartmental Planning, it is important to look for instances of Initiative Interdependencies to ensure they are handled appropriately, and resources are allocated efficiently.
Operational Plan
The Operational Plan organizes the highest priority initiatives that come from Interdepartmental Planning into an execution-focused schedule over the planning horizon of one or two years. The Operational Plan allows the organization to “put its head down” and push aggressively forward in an agreed upon direction. The plan becomes the company’s marching orders, allowing everyone to row in tandem, confident with the decisions made to this point, since the leadership positions from all areas of the organization have been included in developing this plan.
The Operational Plan considers resource and budget constraints, establishes the timing for when each initiative will begin, and determines who will take ownership of the initiative. The budgeting process and project planning used in the Operational Plan will be based on the organization’s existing budgeting and project management processes.
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Explore the entire Elements Book Series!
Interdepartmental Planning is just one book in our series called Organizational ReWilding: 11 Elements of an Exceptional Business. Each book addresses a fundamental element of what comprises a great company.
The books are divided into four categories: Leadership, Infrastructure, Strategy, and Culture. Each one follows the same format as Interdepartmental Planning, with chapters structured to explain a principle, illustrate what it looks like in practice using a fictional company, and closing with application questions designed to help you apply the principle to your own business. Click below to learn more.