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In business, long term plans are desperately needed to keep a business on track with goals that will see it into the future. Much like every person living today, having some kind of long term goal allows you to then, make plans that will get you to that point. You can’t not know where you’re going and start packing beforehand. It’s the same in business as you need to know your destination before you make plans that could last for 5, 10 or more years. These long term plans could be something like expanding to a two warehouse business. You might have a goal of hiring double the amount of employees you have now in the space of the next 3 years. A common plan is to expand to a medium sized business in the space of 10 years. These projects that you have, take many years to fully implement which means, anything could happen in between that time. The project may cost you a certain amount one year, but something major could happen like an economic disaster, and suddenly you not only need to change your project to keep it alive but manage the budget for it too.

Estimate a worse case scenario

If you have a project of advancing certain technology as your product, this means you will need to improve each time on the previous product. Samsung has a long term plan of making smartphones but the project they are currently most known for is the Galaxy series. The goal could be to get to a certain amount of Galaxy series phones before a new series is started. But what if something happens like a competitor crushes the market and sales drop, what should they do? Well, you must always have a plan that is ready for a worst case scenario. This could mean that you severely cut back funding of the project until you have a clear picture of how you could save it. Could you improve on one area more? Could you perhaps drop a feature of that project altogether? For example, a clothing company might have very poor sales a couple of years and rather than release a new project in five different colors, they only release it in three instead. They might even make it with different materials instead. This is something your project needs to have.

See the changes occur

Long term plans are made up of many years. Each year is made up of four financial quarters. And all of these are made up of months, weeks and days. Anything can happen that could force you to change the project and adjust the budget for it too. Utilize a service that allows you to see more of this kind of information spread out across a graph or a detailed report. A virtual chief of information does this for you by holding all the relevant data about the project. Any changes you make can be seen in real time and the effect shown all the way across the board and length of the project.

Every business has long term goals so a milestone can be set to reach for. But always bear in mind, these sole or sometimes individual projects are subject to all kinds of changes along the way to their completion.

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