A business plan is a statement of an organisation’s objectives and the actions by which it intends to achieve these objectives.

All organisations need to be managed. Management is active and the managers of public sector organisations increasingly need to ensure that the organisation is able to anticipate and respond to the opportunities and threats that exist. As management ideas in the public sector have changed, so has the need for the proper planning of the activities that the public services deliver.

To enable you to keep pace, this publication sets out the essential features of a business plan for you to use as a template for your own planning purposes. It takes the experiences of the private sector in business planning and makes them accessible to the public sector manager. All the essential elements of a business plan are featured and include: