Ron Dimon - Connected Planning

Today's marketplace is fraught with stiff competition, pandemic, and increasingly uncertain geopolitical dynamics. Connected Planning provides the framework for leaders to adopt and implement an agile decision-making environment—an environment that encourages employees to lead themselves while driving the organization forward amidst the velocity and uncertainty of the market.

Christopher Neck, PhD

Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona

October 2020

I have been involved with what is now called Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) in one way or another my entire career, whether it was in financial reporting and analysis or formulating strategy for our global business. I am a strong proponent of closing the gap between high-level strategy and day-to-day decisions, and of completing the cycle from a decision to its effectiveness. All too often we devise great plans and set out to execute them and then get overcome by events or sidetracked without coming back to see how relevant our plans were or how effective our decisions are.

Current economic demands and competitive pressure now require that we pay more attention to this cycle of Strategy, Plan, Execute, Analyze, and Improve. We must be more flexible and adaptable and be able to react to changing market conditions and customer preferences. And we must have a new level of accountability at all levels of our organizations. And with more mature and advanced EPM tools and the vast amounts of data at our disposal, there is no reason we should not be using this to give us more insight into the business and make faster, better decisions.

At Hyatt, we use our EPM capabilities to optimize all of our resources in pursuit of our goal of becoming the most preferred brand in each customer segment that we serve, not just for our guests but also for our managers, associates, and investors. The general managers at our full-service owned and managed hotels have an average tenure of more than 21 years at Hyatt. They are supported by regional management teams that use information, planning, analytics, and what-if modeling to support our general managers in achieving their goals. EPM is one of the foundational elements of our success and helps us focus on our mission of providing authentic hospitality.

EPM is not just another management fad or another technology buzz- word. This is doing commonsense, fact-based management right. In this book, Ron Dimon shows us a way to think about EPM holistically and directly connects it to what's important in the business: sustainably delivering stakeholder value. The book provides a framework to hang your EPM roadmap onto, and helps you prioritize what's next on your journey to managing and improving performance. I wish you luck on that journey.

Gebhard Rainer, EVP and CFO

Hyatt Hotels Corporation

Chicago, IL

November 2012

This is the second edition of the book originally entitled Enterprise Performance Management Done Right published in 2012. Since that time, much has changed in the world of connecting strategy with improved performance: new, cloud-based, in-memory technologies have been adopted by the largest organizations in the world, more unstructured data and ways of handling it, and an even faster pace of business disruption and competition. Since the first edition was published, I've noticed more emphasis has been placed on the planning, modeling, and analytics components of Enterprise Performance Management, as organizations are eager to improve their ability to react quickly to changing markets and customers, changing competition, and changing employee needs. The desire to improve readiness for change as a core competency among my clients is driving more interest in planning processes and technologies.

What's changed in the second edition:

There is more emphasis on the debate and commit sections of the Enterprise Performance Management framework. I am using the term “connected planning” to emphasize that;

There is less emphasis on the statutory consolidation and reporting process, as the audience for this is limited to the Finance department, and Connected Planning appeals more to business managers and teams;

Chapters have been reordered to provide better flow of the Connected Planning process;

A new chapter on digital planning, and those new technologies that impact planning and forecasting, has been added;

As most planning systems are now cloud-based, or most organizations are moving to the cloud, the cloud architecture diagrams have been removed;

Whiteboard drawings have been updated and standardized by the steady hand of Meredith Dimon, Greenware Press Studios.

This book is for CFOs, CIOs, their direct reports, and any organizational visionary or aspiring leader who wants to “bring it all together” and create an actionable vision and plan for improving readiness and performance. The book is also intended for managers who want to understand Connected Planning and how it can help them be better managers. My hope is that any student of planning and forecasting can learn and apply at least a few ideas from this book.

Connected Planning is essentially about three things to help you improve your management operating system:

1 A Framework. This is the management operating system for your business and shows how all of the pieces of Connected Planning work together as one holistic process. It is most useful as a long-term, high-level Connected Planning vision.

2 Enabling Technologies. Within the framework, I show what pieces you need to put into place to deliver on the necessary planning processes and how to connect them.

3 A Fresh Planning Roadmap. This is insight on how to prioritize all those potential planning and forecasting initiatives given your strategic business objectives, and how they are supported by enabling technologies, eventually being fulfilled on your aspirational Connected Planning framework.

The book is organized into 11 chapters:

Chapter 1: What's Broken and What's Possible? This chapter gives you an overview of the promise of Connected Planning. It helps you understand what problems this domain was created to solve and how well it's been solving them.

Chapter 2: Connected Planning. A new chapter in the second edition that gives an overview of Connected Planning, the components, and other definitions that help readers navigate the rest of the book.

Chapter 3: A Planning Operating System. This is the central framework of the book and of the model for Connected Planning as a process. Each of the cornerstones of the process are explored in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4: Debate: What Can We Do and What Should We Do? One of the most overlooked cornerstones of Connected Planning, modeling “what if” scenarios, is the topic of this chapter. Enabling a robust, fact-based, open debate in the company helps it prepare for a variety of possible futures and helps it maximize the value of its assets and minimize risk.

Chapter 5: Commit: Who Will Deliver What, by When? There's more to Connected Planning than only planning. This chapter describes some better practices and shows how planning should be connected to the other areas of the management operating system.

Chapter 6: Visualize: Where Are We, Right Now? One of the most common needs of Connected Planning is variance reporting. It helps answer the question “where are we and how are we doing?” at a point in time. This chapter outlines how reporting and visualization has changed to be much more dynamic, how it must deliver more insight than ever, and how it cannot live in isolation from the planning process.