Review, reflect, reset: How to plan for the new financial year

The first day of the new financial year lets you start from a clean slate, and get creative on how you’ll tackle your business growth over the next 12 months.

It’s also just another day in business that you can make the most of.

While best laid plans can fall to the wayside, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of seeing your projects through to the end, successfully.

SmartCompany Plus spoke to David Mallett, managing director of Yanun Project Services — an Indigenous owned and Supply Nation certified SME that specialises in the delivery of on-time and on-budget complex projects — for advice on how to improve your project planning and management.

Ask the right questions

The new financial year is an opportunity to step back and reflect, review, and reset your strategy. This can be as simple as reflecting on what was accomplished vs what you’ve set out to achieve. 

Here are a few questions to start your process that you can tick off as you work through.

Review, reflect, reset

1. What went well?

2. Why was that the case?

3. What could we improve?

4. How can we improve it?

5. What challenges and opportunities are we facing as a company, or the industry as a whole?

6. What trends are we seeing in adjacent industries that could affect the markets we operate in?

Fail to plan, plan to fail

You have the greatest ability to shape your likelihood of success at the beginning of a project, Mallett tells me.

“As the project moves through its lifecycle, your ability to make changes which positively affect the outcome are reduced and the cost of implementing changes increases,” he explains.

When you plot this out, there is a clear point where implementing the changes is outweighed by the cost.

Time vs cost. Source: supplied.

“The easiest way for projects to fall off the rails is when they move out of planning and into execution too quickly. Time and time again I see people rush to move into action mode without proper planning, which is an absolute recipe for disaster,” Mallett says.

Grant Petty, a recent rich-lister and founder of Blackmagic Design, lives by the same process.

“The most fundamental thing that most people get wrong in business is taking the first view of something and running with it. Often, it is the completely wrong thing to do and you need to go much deeper to find the right thing,” Petty noted in a SmartCompany Plus interview.

“If you go deeper, it’s a fascinating world. It’s like assuming the whole world is made up of atoms, then realising that the atoms themselves are made up of something. There are whole worlds below the first thought that you have.”

While it’s important for SMEs to be agile, continually testing and adjusting, investing more time up front can save you the cost of making changes later.

Expecting the unexpected to manage risk

In the project management world, risk workshops are used to map out all the potential dangers to a project being completed on time, and on budget, usually in combination with a subject matter expert.

“This often considers all the possible risks that might occur, the likelihood that they may happen and the effect or consequence,” says Mallett.

Essentially you’re mapping out likelihood vs consequence, as seen below.

“For example there might be a risk that is almost certain will occur, but the impact is insignificant, such as someone getting a paper cut,” says Mallett.

“At the other end of the spectrum, there may be a risk that is rare, but has a severe impact, such as a fatality.”

Staff retention is key to success

While planning and management can limit the chances of a project falling off the rails, turnover of project personnel can limit your ability to complete them on time, and budget.

“When people leave, they take significant knowledge with them and bringing new people up to speed costs time and money. For an SME, encouraging employee retention by focusing on the employee experience, can significantly reduce the cost of downstream recruitment and upskilling,” Mallet says.

It’s a time investment now that pays off later.

Focus, don’t multitask

When you’re a business owner juggling responsibilities, you can be tempted to multitask as your attention is pulled in different directions.

If you’re trying to plan your upcoming year while running other parts of your business, you’re shortchanging yourself.

Research shows that multitasking limits your ability to think clearly and strategically, as there is a mental cost to ‘switching’ between tasks.

If you need to multitask, you can organise and batch similar tasks together, so that your brain isn’t jumping too far between them. Consider this in the planning stage to give yourself a better chance of meeting your goals.

So set the time apart that you need, and set yourself up for success in the new financial year.