Having difficulty implementing multiple initiatives? Try planning in reverse: "backplanning" is an approach that many CFOs and their teams are using to collectively visualize the interdependence among teams' key milestones for initiatives competing for resources and funding.

Imagine you are CFO for a major commercial product company that is looking for ways to grow. Over the last 12 months, several of your teams have suggested key strategic initiatives that could catapult the company's sales from $300 million to $600 million over the next four years.

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However, the failure of any one will spell disaster for all the others, and each team is focused on its own, demanding more funding and resources. These initiatives include:

* Supply chain reducing order-to-delivery from 45 to 3 days

* High potential retention program

* Warranty cost-reduction program

* New sales to national accounts

* Investing in a new product line

* A new customer service initiative

From where you sit, acceding to all of these demands would blow the overall budget with no hope of keeping things in line with your plan to reduce overall costs each year by 5 percent. Further, your CEO admits that this looks impossible, but having promised the board of directors to deliver according to plan, wants you to develop a plan that both keeps all costs under control and delivers all the initiatives on time.

This potential "train wreck" is becoming more and more common. Finance departments have led the charge to help their organizations cut costs, and today's lean organizations have left no slack in the system. At the same time, the world at large has gotten far more complex. The easy-to-implement performance initiatives have been done, and top management teams must now implement a complex series of key initiatives to take their organizations to the next level. No one initiative will carry the day; they will all have to succeed.

This new reality requires a more effective means to control, measure, track and adjust activities across a wide range of initiatives. Detailed project plans, budgets and forecasting plans can be helpful but are often insufficient to coordinate an array of complex linked initiatives and keep them on track.

There is a way to help the company anticipate the looming organizational train wrecks before they happen. Results-Driven Backplanning (or "backplanning") is an approach that many CFOs and their firms have utilized to great success. Working with management teams over a two-to-three-day period, backplanning helps cross-organizational groups collectively visualize the interdependence among the key milestones that must be accomplished for all initiatives.

The resulting output is a one-page "backplan" that transforms a complex set of detailed plans from different groups with different assumptions into one coherent, integrated set of actions and required results. Employing this method, the subset of groups that must commit to achieving results in the ensuing 30-90 days is made clear for all to see.

There are four primary components to backplanning:

1. Define the 20 percent of measurable business results that are the most critical to meeting the strategy. Start by getting clear on all the key business results that drive the overall outcome. In the example of the commercial product company, the list of initiatives was long relative to doubling sales in four years. But through backplanning, the team began to see the key initiatives: sales to the national accounts of 300 million, delivery times (supply chain) of three days' new products equaling 70 percent of sales; and a need to achieve all by Dec. 31, 2008. Getting alignment across these initiatives sets the tone for how all the other groups need to align for success.

2. Plan key results working backwards from the end toward the present, and on one page. Starting in 2008 and working back to 2004 is the next step. Forward-based planning typically pushes the difficult and the most urgent issues far into the future. With backplanning, you start at the desired future and work back toward the present, identifying what results must be in place in earlier timeframes to meet the final outcomes: what must be done now is redefined from the perspective of the future. By planning from the end date and defining what earlier results (versus activities) must be in place by Q4/Q2 2007, Q4/Q2 2006, and then back to key interim results delivered in 12, nine, six, and three months, several crucial matters are discovered:

* A significant number of major results must happen in the zero-to-three-month timeframe to achieve the needed four-year results.

* Existing approaches to getting work done are no longer adequate. Results that people believed they had nine to 12 months to achieve must occur much sooner. Thus, the current approach for getting the job done is ineffective and won't deliver successful results; also, the practice of "thinking outside the box" shifts from an interesting exercise to a dire necessity.

* At the risk of delaying strategic results, previously unresolved top management decisions become urgent issues to be resolved immediately. There is a crucial difference between the statement: "I need $200,000 in additional funding" and "For every month we don't have the funding, the final result slips by at least one quarter."

Problematic underlying assumptions become easier to identify as the conflict between what is seen in the Results-Driven Backplan clashes with unworkable current assumptions.

The commercial product company was no exception. By defining all the results across the three initiatives on one page, the impending disaster became painfully clear. To meet the large national account sales critical to the whole plan, the first of four national contracts would need to be signed in three months, with a five-day guaranteed delivery. The current delivery time was 42 days!

No one had realized that the groups responsible for sales/marketing to national accounts and the supply chain initiative were completely out of sync. Even by backplanning from the end date, the supply chain team still didn't achieve five-day delivery for another two years, which made the financial goals completely unattainable. Because so many initiatives were all competing for attention, senior management had readily (and easily, due to the lack of transparency) overlooked these fundamental details.

3. Address the Cross-Organizational Disconnects. Necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. Knowing which issue is the most critical to solve can create amazing clarity. Within a half-day, the team had developed a dual rollout model for supply chain. The model would create a fast-track system for a subset of key national accounts early on in the process, while driving a complete solution for all accounts on a much longer time line. Identifying the key milestones, resources and scope of funding needed to manage this critical element of the strategy set the tone for all other discussions.

4. Identify the other initiatives that support the 20 percent. All the other initiatives were now planned backwards from the end date. Having the top team be able to step back and look at the whole game was dramatic. Major changes to the goals, funding and gaining resources for the other initiatives became an efficient task. The normal stonewalling, defending and finger-pointing was gone. Everyone could see the bigger picture and how each initiative had to fit--and where critical support was needed to achieve the overall plan. Resources that had been hidden or protected were put on the table and reassigned to allow for the results needed in the next three to six months, across all the initiatives, to be successful.

CFOs and their teams must be able to help their organizations balance achievement of a complex set of cross-organizational strategic initiatives with financial discipline. Results-Driven Backplanning provides a critical tool in helping to uncover and address this challenge and avoid otherwise certain organizational disasters.

Nick Craig is Managing Principal of Potentia Consulting, a Cambridge, Mass.-based firm focused on top team effectiveness, strategy implementation, executive development and coaching, group interventions and the application of intuition to decision-making and future growth. He can be reached at [e-mail] or 978.772.7268.

RELATED ARTICLE: takeaways

* With easy-to-implement performance initiatives done, senior teams must now implement a complex series of key initiatives to drive organizations to new levels.

* "Backplanning" is an approach that helps cross-organizational groups visualize the interdependence between key results that must be accomplished for all initiatives.

* The result of backplanning is a one-page "backplan" that transforms a complex set of detailed plans from groups with different assumptions into one coherent and integrated set of actions and required results.

* The way to start is by getting clear on all the key results that drive the overall outcome.