Business Planning Basics

Business Planning Basics A business plan is much like a roadmap for a business; a roadmap is a guide that directs to a destination, and so too does a business plan accomplish the same task, by detailing and explaining the goals of the business, attempting to guide the business to achieve said stated goals. But, just as no two businesses are exactly alike, no two business plans are alike, nor their preparation, drafting and composition, for it will be unique and specific to not only the nature of the business, but its status, either new or existing. Before a business plan can be drafted, however, with six typical business plans available, the one chosen for use needs to be specific and unique to the business so that the roadmap for achieving the stated goals of the business are led down a smooth and successful path. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the commonalities among typical business plan models, specifically by comparing and contrasting six typical business plan models, describing their strengths and limitations, comparing them to business plan models in Microsoft Project, and discussing the operations business plan that is believed to work best for the assigned CLC business plan assignment associated with this class.
Six common business plan models exist: start-up, internal, strategic, feasibility, operations (more specific type of internal business plan), and growth/expansion, for which a business entity, new or existing, can utilize to maximize their business’ operations and fiscal earning potential.
The Collaborative Learning Community (CLC) team project assigned centers around electronic medical records (EMRs) being created for implementation and use in an existing health care company that has a hospital based clinic and individual clinic entities. Since this project involves the existence of a hypothetical business, the business plan to be created that best suits the needs is an operations (internal) business plan, for not only does it target those internal stakeholders pertinent to the proposed project, but is also helps evaluate the operations flow of said project by evaluating its merits utilizing a systems approach to the implementation based on company operations. This can be thought of much like an operations manual, outlining the employees’ responsibilities and specifying various implementation markers and deadlines for the project’s management and completion. Microsoft Project will be an