All projects need a plan, and all plans should be reviewed from time to time. When it comes to organizing a project (whether it is an online creative business or anything else), we should always start with a clear goal, a detailed road map to achieve them and some basic tasks performance to comply with that roadmap. This will be enough to start the project and believe me you do not need anything else to achieve your destiny. You can lead your normal life and it will not affect your project if you continue reading, buying fantasy books and some products that will surely teach you something new (all kind of products teach something new, even if you do not buy one), but that’s an excuse as I do all the times. Are we diverting from our main topics? Ok, I return to the thread of our article: the annual review of your creative business project.
Do you really need an annual business plan review?
When we are creating our plan, we should define our objectives, from which we can easily distinguish between long-term and short-term goals. It is easy to review on the daily basis and very easy to understand how these short-term objectives will work, whether we are receiving visitors or not, whether we are selling the products or not, but it is much difficult to see the things with broader perspective.
To check those goals we have to give sometimes for clearly understand the things, we cannot analyze a change in the online based on a week statistic, we cannot define how the SEO is working in two days, etc.
To have a clear view of all that things, you must create an annual review of your business plan. For doing that you have to stop in here and take a step back, get out of your regular routine and study your project from the outside. Let’s try to forget today’s task for a moment (and those of yesterday) and only if we are capable of doing that, we are on the right track and correctly analyzing how things are going. Because most of the time we want to justify the whole objective based on a half done task. Of course, I am not going to rectify this because you have to do that on your own and that will be the best thing for your business.
How can you develop a project?
You have to act based on the project and the actions might be different, but some of the actions are universal and you can implement in any targeted goals. Take the papers and set the short, medium and long-term goals from a year back and after that make sure you study and analyze them all the way and if necessary you have to change them completely. From your project many will be achieved, others will be evolving and some of them will no longer apply to your project and you can eliminate them from the project.
The annual review is very similar to the monthly review, but from a remote point of view, both have to analyze the whole data and have to define new objectives for the project.
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If you see the evolution with 12 months statistic there is more than enough data to figure out if a product working nicely or if it has to be removed. There are many analysis tools to help us in this and when we are going to use all that data that we have been collected are very useful for your business review.
Now forget the tasks and focus on goals. You do not have to look at day to day tasks or even short-term goals. We can hardly remember the task we did a year ago, so it’s better to forget about your scheduled tasks, try to find your clear roadmap and your desired goals which are the main purpose of your plan.
Think about what steps you have been taken to achieve that main objective and it is okay if you have to change 360 degrees from your main objective and set up a new objective, maybe the new one will be more successful.
You have to think about how you got here, think if you want to continue with this way or want to change the course to move ahead. If you believe that you have done everything to achieve your goals but at the end, your objectives and the business plan did not work, then surely you have a problem. But congratulations, I have good news for you; the only way to fix your problem is an annual business review.
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You have to check from the starting point, maybe you will get some help to recover, or you have to change your project completely. There are many projects that have been failed, unfortunately, the reasons behind this failure are so diverse and it will be worthless if we name them in here. But remember one thing even if a project does not end well, but you learned something from it. Don’t be afraid of being a failure once again because it is important to understand that with fear you cannot achieve any goal.
How much time should I spend on the project?
You can dedicate a few hours, a whole day, or maybe you have to dedicate the whole month to understand the project. But you must have to spend time on the project. Believe me, even if you use a whole week to get the clear understanding of the project, it will make your company/business go in the right direction with a much better performance. If you do not have any idea what you’re doing, it will be much harder to do.
Set some new long-term goals:
From this review, we have to draw a conclusion. Set up some new objectives for the medium and long term because you cannot do something today for tomorrow.
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There will be another key point to analyze those goals, you can plan short-term goals and set some milestones and tasks to achieve them. That will be your monthly and quarterly reviews and now you have to keep in perspective that you are planning, not executing.
You must take advantage of it and take an action of this revision. Note down the conclusions, the entire objectives and the whole plan of Action and placed in an easy to find place. It will be your reference for the next year review.
