home » Using Backpack for nonlinear business planning

Using Backpack for nonlinear business planning

by Paula | 7 June 2009 | permalink | comments [1]
Tags: business planning, peak oil
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Last fall, I published a blog post called Engineer your own soft landing? The nonlinear business plan which described a planning strategy that takes into account various decline scenarios. In a nutshell, the goal is to develop miniature business plans for each of a number of different scenarios, the pieces of which can be mixed and matched depending upon how events play out.

This is a followup to that post and describes how to use the free online tool Backpack to develop, and keep current with, a nonlinear business plan.

What is Backpack?

Backpack is one of a family of online business softwares engineered by a company called 37Signals, with which you are probably familiar if your work involves the web in almost any way.

From the Backpack website: “Backpack is an easy intranet for your business. Store, share, discuss, and archive everything that’s essential for your team. Safe and secure.” And that’s just what Backpack does — it allows you to keep notes, lists, write documents, keep a journal, and more; and, it allows you to collaborate and share all this with business partners, clients, or whomever you wish to invite.

The organizational features of Backpack make it a great choice for building a nonlinear business plan. It is also incredibly simple to use, and includes both a free version, which I’ve used to set up my example; a solo version for $7/mo that has some additional features; and a series of ever-larger versions for SMEs all the way up to global enterprise.

Getting Oriented

Backpack’s center of gravity is its “Pages.” Pages offer the ability to quickly add notes, lists, writeboards and dividers:

• Notes are brief snippets of information
• Lists are checklists used most frequently for to-do lists, which can be checked off as tasks are completed. They are useful for just plain lists too, however.
• Writeboards are full documents which are composed right in Backpack. What’s nice about these is that Backpack will save draft versions along the way rather than overwriting everything all the time.
• Dividers are simply page dividers that help keep your content sectioned off and more organized.

Pages can also be tagged just as a blog post, a link at De.licio.us, or a photo at Flickr would be tagged.

Each page is assigned its own email address so that users can email lists, notes and such to their pages; emailed content is added automatically, and can be re-arranged later.

Page content items can be dragged-and-dropped onto other pages. This is going to come in very handy for our purposes.

Getting Started

Backpack’s free account comes with five pages. I’ve set up the pages in my example account like so:

• Summary — Equivalent to the standard executive summary of an existing business plan
• Current — This page is set up with the subheadings of the Summary page, but is otherwise blank. It’ll be the repository for scenario planning items as they are needed.
• Scenario 1: Hyperinflation
• Unused
• Unused

The links above go to live, published Backpack pages. They aren’t interactive, but demonstrate pretty well what a Backpack page looks like.

Filling in the Pages

The “Summary” page describes where the business currently stands; this is important information to hang on to and shouldn’t change much. It provides an anchor for recalling where the business has been so that its owner can avoid repeating mistakes, and/or look back to see what worked in the past as the economy rides the bumpy plateau. The Journal feature of Backpack is also useful for keeping track of what gets changed and when, and can serve as a reference for the same purposes.

The “Current” page is where most of the action takes place. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The “Scenario” pages are for developing actionable alternatives to current business practices. These are just like the Summary page, but the information included under each heading changes to suit whatever scenario requires alternative actions. Compare the section headings on both the Summary and Hyperinflation pages linked above; they are the same, but the Hyperinflation page content is changed to reflect potential actions.

The “Current” Page

The Current page remains empty until needed. This is a record of current maneuverings and will change as conditions change. Content here comes from the Scenario pages: any list, note, or other item added to the Scenario pages can be dragged-and-dropped into the Current page. This allows an entrepreneur to mix-and-match preplanned responses, and to have a nearly instantaneous document to refer to when dealing with investors, creditors, employees, and for personal organizational purposes.

For exmaple, say hyperinflation does set in and money becomes nearly worthless. Barter will become a necessity, but rather than scrambling to figure out how to make barter work, a small business owner has figured out ahead of time what she can offer and what she can accept in trade. She simply drags the relevant items from her Hyperinflation page to her Current page; the Current page can then be emailed to employees, partners, or whomever; it can be printed out; and it can be edited as needed.

When conditions change and these items are no longer effective, they can be dragged back onto the Hyperinflation page to be reused again later.

If you try it

If you give Backpack a whirl for nonlinear business planning, I’d love to hear back from you to know how it goes. I am in the process of developing my own nonlinear business plan in this way and would be interested in comparing notes.

If you need help

If you’d like to try this but need a hand I’d be happy to help. What I’ll do is this: I can meet with you on the phone and give you a tour of Backpack, and walk you through the process of setting up pages and the like. Then you can pay me whatever you think the value of my help is. No set price — if this turns out to be a service I’ll offer through my business I’ll set a price then, but in the meantime you get to decide. If you’re interested drop me an email and we’ll see what we can do.

comments

1. Other simple way to do it is by using excel. I have made them some times during my college time. It is simple and easy to modified as well.

   — jonathan · 21 July 2009, 00:28 · #

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