What is an annual operational plan? Imagine you are a healthy but non-sportive person who dreams of running a Marathon in less than three hours in 3 years time. If you want to realise your dreams you will set the strategic goal “run a Marathon in less than three hours in 3 years”. In order to have a fair chance to be successful you will need to build up your body and mind fitness within the coming months and years. You will have to develop a weekly training programme that allows you to achieve “objectives or milestones” such as after 6 months running 5 kilometres in less than 40 minutes. After one year of continuous training you want to be able to run 10 kilometres in less than an hour and so on.
The training programme refers to the annual operational plan. Only if you work out and fulfil the training programme you will step by step achieve your objectives and only if you achieve the objectives you will be able to finally arrive at the point where you can run a Marathon in less than three hours in three years.
The annual operational plan summarises all the activities authorised by the board of directors to be undertaken in the coming year in order to achieve the short-term objectives. The operational plan together with the financial planning and the strategic business plan are the basic guide for the institution’s operations.
How do you develop the operational plan? The annual plan is the summary of the detailed programme and activity plans, the programme budgets and the work plans. Similar to the business plan, risks and potential barriers need to be made visible for future control and management. Supplementary, the guide speaks about the planning of the programme evaluation as an important field of activity especially for externally funded projects and programmes.
After having gone through the chapter on programme planning, budgeting, and work and evaluation planning, develop your plan on the basis of the template annual operational plan. attaching the yearly budget and cash flow projections