• How-to

Yes, this section of your business plan will focus on your product’s design and development. The aim here should be to give your investors an idea of how the product is being designed and developed, within a certain budget, to be able to achieve the company’s targets.

Set up your goals well
In the process of development, your first task is to set goals for the process—both long term and short term. These goals should be well-categorized into technical as well as marketing goals. Each goal should have timelines, must be in line with eventual business success and, most importantly, be realistic and not beyond your team’s abilities.

Mark out procedures
A process becomes successful after you follow the exact procedures required for its completion time and the result hoped for. Your investor too would like you to have and follow procedures; give them an idea about your organizational behavior. Your procedures must include resource allocation, responsibilities of team members and how the information will flow within the team.

Have a time-lined checklist
With the procedures, you will be able to create a list of work assignments that need to be accomplished and will correlate with the stages your product must pass muster with. Make a schedule of all these assignments, how long each will take, the start date as well as the stop date, and the budgets for each. Against these assignments, have another column that juxtaposes the task completion dates against the stages of product development.

Man the money
Your budget will always be crucial to your design and development plan. When making it, you need to take into account all the expenses required to design the product and take to production. Costs that need to be accounted for are those associated with material, labor, overhead, marketing and sales, professional services, equipment and office support functions.

Team man
It is quite possible that you may not be covering all bases expertise-wise and may need new people. You must determine which areas require people to be recruited. To do this, review the goals and compare the skill sets needed to accomplish them against the skill sets available already. You will know your gaps and will be able to write out a job description. After you have hired people, it is equally important that they know what their role is within the company and the development team.

Know the danger
It is also important that within this section, you highlight the risks associated with developing the product and the way you will address each one. These could be of many types—technical, marketing, human and financial. If you identify and address these risks now, you will be better off during the development process. Prevention is, after all, much better than cure.

This is the sixth of a multi-part series.

©Entrepreneur July 2010

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business plan, design, development, product