Essay

Successful Integrated Planning: The Short Version

The book run back to front, solution first. Condensed from the book published by Kogan Page, 2018

I wrote the book front to back, in the classic consulting arc: situation, complication, implication, conclusion. Nine chapters of diagnosis before a word of prescription. That was deliberate. The central claim is that most integrated planning initiatives fail because leaders reach for the solution before they have understood the problem, and it seemed wrong to structure the book the same way.

But an essay is not a book, and if you are reading this you have probably lived the diagnosis: the stalled S&OP programme, the demand-planning tool the planners abandoned, the transformation that produced a conference presentation and not much else. So here is the argument in reverse: the solution first, then why it works, then, briefly, the disease it treats.

One definition before starting. Integrated planning is the attempt to ensure that at least two entities work together to build and execute operational plans for the best overall outcome. Two departments, two plants, two companies: the principle scales, and so do the problems. The hypothesis is threefold. Organisations have built structures, rules and information flows that make it hard for people to consider the objectives of anyone outside their own group, which makes integrated planning a socially complex problem. Most failed interventions stem from misreading that problem and treating it with a top-down change programme. And the earliest stages of an intervention are where success is decided, which puts the burden on leadership.

In the essay

• Platforms, not pipes: why rolled-out solutions get switched off
• Mobilise, socialise, systemise, learn: the four platforms and their balance
• The leader’s toolkit: scenarios, bazaars, the ladder of inference, positive deviance
• Why integrated planning is a wicked problem, and what the manager under pressure does instead
• 2018, read from 2026