If you learned how to write a business plan at all, you probably learned how to write a MBA quality 30-page plan designed to attract investors or get a bank loan. In addition, if you are like most of us, after your initial start up you never looked at your plan again.

Often with a prospective client, just asking the simple question “tell me about your business plan” can lead to all the information I need to coach this business owner to next year. I learn about the vision for the business, the issues, the focus, the employees or lack of and I learn about the customer who buys their product or service.

Entrepreneurs are typically great talkers so I wait until after their first breath and say something like “is all this in writing” or “what do your employees think about the plan”? Really, it is not meant to be an earth shattering provocative question. Somehow it usually is.

On a side note, I love entrepreneurs. It could be that I love them because they are often a lot like me. They have great ideas, a positive attitude and have way too much to do! It could be I enjoy them because their business issues are a lot like my own. It could just be that I tend to favor the underdog and want to see the mom and pop organization take market share and win against all odds. Okay, it is probably all three.

So when I ask about their business plan, it’s because I have learned that most of my clients don’t have one and that when they take the time to think through their focus and strategy, preferably with their team, everything comes together.

When the time is right, I ask my clients “What would it be like if you could reference a plan when making choices?” Can you imagine being able to share the whole plan with your employees, affiliates and your coach”? Sometimes I ask, “Can you imagine the freedom you will have when it is out of your head and on paper?” or “What if everyone understood the business strategy, as well as the business strengths and weaknesses?” These questions along with my simple business plan format usually do the trick and they go to work on a plan.

They often report many insights into future mistakes that would have happened had they not written the plan and that having a simple plan in writing has allowed the whole team to collaborate, align and support the business vision.

For a simple business plan format go to www.profitconsultingco.com/business.htm or join us for business planning tele class in October.

Alicia Fruin -Owner Profit Consulting Co. Business coach and trainer

Alicia Marie applies almost two decades of business ownership experience, as well as a wealth of sales and marketing knowledge, to help her clients tackle the business challenges they face. http://www.profitconsultingco.com

When going through the process of searching for cheap automotive insurance quote, there is an easy process that you can go through online that will assist you in finding the right company for your needs. When looking online for car insurance, there are many ways you can go about getting the quotes you want. As I mentioned above, you can use a comparison website that will allow you to receive different quotes from different companies at the same time and you are only required to enter your details once. If you would prefer not to use this type of service, you can go to each website of the insurance company that you want a quote from and fill out their individual forms to receive your quote. This process allows you to choose all the companies that you receive the quotes from.

Receiving Automobile Insurance Quotes Online

Once you have decided which way you want to receive your direct auto insurance quotes online, there are some things to keep in mind. When going to individual websites to ask for quotes, make sure that you enter the same details about yourself on each form. This will help ensure that you receive accurate quotes on the same amount of coverage from each company. You will need to make sure you are honest about your driving history and credit report, as if you are not, this will come out eventually and cause an increase in the amounts you were quoted. The insurance companies will verify this information. There is no way to get around this.

When you are using the online portion of an general auto insurance company, you always have the option of calling their main number to speak with someone to get all your questions answered. If you have doubts or any type of question, it is important to contact them to clear it up. Some auto insurance companies will offer online chat to an insurance agent. This can be helpful when looking for insurance as you can get your questions answered or get help walking through the detail process of the form. The main page of the site should tell you if they offer online chat and if it is available at that moment in time or not.

Willie James is a car insurance expert of CAR INSURANCE NEWS agency. His job is to analyze online auto insurance company’s information and publish different reviews for Federal Insurance Bureu (FIB) in Moscow, Russia. His hobby is styding a psychodelic plants like Salvia Divinorum (Shalfey) other entheogens and exotic plants.

Many – including me – evangelize on the noble goal of creating a Enterprise Architecture before setting out on an IT project. One of the key issues with that is that the ‘Enterprise’ hardly ever acts as such. The typical enterprise is at best a federation of little fiefdoms, that more often than not are in constant political warfare against each other. That gets even worse when the enterprise has been assembled by acquisition and worst with hostile takeovers. It is highly unlikely that these fiefdom chiefs will be too happy to collaborate with other chiefs on creating a new Enterprise Architecture. Even if there is c-level buy-in and a champion has been chosen, bureaucratic resistance makes many projects falter. I am quite certain that one reason is wrong expectations set by over-hyped marketing.

Several BPM and application vendors promote the benefits of model-driven development and some even claim that they make that available to the business user (fiefdom chief). Some BPM vendors want the business user to work with a flowcharting tool and others with a requirements wiki/blog thing. This amazing business user would then ‘model’ the necessary business entities. I am sure that comes natural for most, right? This ‘ExtremlySMART’ process software would then generate the process CODE to execute those models. I have to admit that I am in awe. Supposedly that functionality – as simple as described here – ensures a dynamic enterprise with the agility to handle rapid change. Hmm? The user not only can create enterprise models and deploy them automatically but can foresee the necessary changes and how those will impact the current generated code? Amazing. A few abstract models supposedly do the trick. Astonishing. In less than three month those users make it all happen? Wow!

We propose to make much simpler features than architecture models available to business users and more often than not that fails quite miserably. So our software must be less good than our competition? I think not, it is just our marketing that is less blunt. Business users aren’t architects. They do not care about architecture. Just defining what processes one business unit needs and to get them tested takes certainly already longer than three months! Without architectural considerations. No implementation yet. Certainly not the final thing.

But I agree that the reuse and sharing of conceptual business knowledge would be the only chance to properly sell the benefits of a business architecture to business users. It has to be made visible and usable and allow them to not only participate but utilize the existing models to speed up their own implementation and deployment. Business users think in business terms, in content and what they see. Some may even think in rules. Finito. Thats as far architecture will go.

The benefits of creating a consolidated process and content driven architecture are:

Create a reusable business architecture by doing local projects that are managed in a repository Grow the applications by involving business users iteratively within the project to define content, views and processes (not models!) Utilize version controlled change management to deploy the architecture models into a scalable production environment Processes are not rigid flows that require analysis effort but are assembled by users and controlled by rules and trained patterns Enable business users to enter simple natural language business rules

For the business user the application has to look different than to the architect. It has to start with the business organization that represents effectively the role/policy definition for the actual process authorization. Data entities must be real-word plausible things that a business person can make sense of – a so called business object. Not SOA/XML data structures for the service interface. Certainly not BPMN or BPEL. The connection of the service interface to the business object (with or without SOA) must happen once by an IT expert to be reused all across the enterprise given the right authorization.

The next element to be created by business is the business content. Not documentation or descriptive text, but documents that contain relevant business data and information. There is no content without process and process without content you don’t need. (Here I go again …) Based on their authorization business users can assemble and create new business content from a library of texts and logic building blocks. These are linked to task/activity/todo and stored in a business library of processes.

To be able to work with the content the users have to be able to define their processes/cases. I propose (as you know) that there should not be any rigid processes. Users simply drag and drop content and business objects into the case. The process is owned and created by the relevant business users. Creating content outside the context of a business case/process should ideally be impossible.

Now, how can the process/case be controlled and propagated? I propose further that if you start with the right user role/policy authorization and your content is assigned the right role/policy definition for its executable methods, then many complex process definitions fall by the wayside. If only one user role is authorized to change the case state then no further business rules or decision blocks are necessary. But obviously it is possible that a fairly complex rule has to be added that controls what can or can not be done. In this case the business user or analyst can add business rules to the case model, ideally in a non-technical manner. Rules that are linked into the context of the business process are connected to it by events that trace the relationships and therefore complex resolution algorithms such as RETE are not required.

The first level of task assignment should be by role authorization and queue visibility.

If one or more users or departments share the same role assignments then automatic load balancing must take over (load, availability, priority). Rather than coding complex decision trees, decision maps, and decision tables the training if decision patterns is more efficient.

Simple time controlled state changes can ensure that service level agreements are adhered to in the process. Event listeners can trigger rules and rules can send events to interconnect object attribute value changes Rules can not only be simple IF/THEN statements but also commands and object-relational queries and searches. The context of the rule in the process and its event linkage avoids the need for conventional forward or backward chaining. Process state can simply decide whether a process requires human interaction or can run in lights-out mode. (aka straight-through processing).

Let’s  not forget that each user likes his own very special way how the workload should be presented to him/her. I suggest that the users should be allowed and enabled to freely customize their own user interface to their liking. With your typical forms, Java or Ajax interfaces that is not feasible or maintainable.

Last but not least: would it not be nice if the system could discover by itself what summary content state will drive the process state forward. I propose that this has to be the future.

Yes, we can and we should strive to empower the business user. But it has to be more than a marketing announcement. Those you will find predominantely in the BPM community. From giving away flowchart design tools to business users, to requirement wikis there are many so-called revolutionary ideas that at best are incremental progress if at all. The revolutionary ideas are found in the Papyrus Platform.