REDUCED SCHEDULE AND LOW COST APPROACH

Do a lot of the work yourself up front. This will help to guide the structure
and completeness of the plan and strategy. It will also save time and money.
Increase the involvement of others in review and refinement. Develop successive
drafts of the plan and strategy in the forms of lists and bulleted items. Design
your transaction diagrams as quickly as possible because you want to get a
reaction and have people get comfortable with the detail. Use presentations
instead of documents. They are simpler and faster to create and modify.
To reduce any gap in time between the plan and strategy and between the
strategy and detailed work, you should concentrate on the strategy as soon as
you have defined your first version of the plan. Then you can work in parallel on
both. This will also give people a more complete picture of what is going on.
Another idea to reduce time is to market the results to managers as you go. In
that way, when the final products are complete, there will be no surprises. You
will be able to directly proceed to the next step in Chapter 3. We prefer informal
presentations in which you walk through the transactions first and then expand
management’s understanding of the general process from the bottom up.