Blog #36: Five Signs Your CEO Still Trusts Your IBP
What if I sat down with your CEO and asked them this: what did your IBP process actually decide last month?
Not report. Not review. Decide.
Would they answer with conviction - or would they glance at someone else in the room first?
IBP was sold to your CEO as a control mechanism. One process, one room, every month, with the people who can commit resources and the trade-offs out in the open. A way to control the company.
So here’s my challenge to you: is it delivering that? Or has it become just another meeting on the calendar that generates a deck but not a direction?
Here are five signs that will tell you.
1. Your CEO can tell you what IBP decided last month - without notes.
Not what it reported. What it decided. And whether those decisions are still holding a month later.
If they can answer - your IBP is working. If they hesitate or glance sideways - you have your answer too. I’ve seen that happen. It ain’t pretty - for them or you.
2. People ask to be in the room - and get turned away.
Success has many fathers. When IBP is working, everyone wants a seat at the table. The meeting has a reputation. Decisions get made there. Things happen as a result.
But not everyone gets in. The room is deliberately small. Only the people who need to decide are present. Everyone else gets the outcome - clearly, deliberately, but after the call has been made.
The sign you’re looking for: people ask to be in the room. Some get turned away. And the decisions still reach them anyway.
3. Finance are in the room - and not just for the numbers.
In too many instances, finance turns up at the end of the IBP cycle to reconcile what everyone else decided. They get the outputs. They weren’t part of the conversation.
When IBP is working, finance are present across every review. Not as scorekeepers. As participants. They bring the commercial conscience - the quiet voice that asks whether the assumptions are honest, whether the gaps are real, whether the plan actually adds up.
And here’s another tell. When IBP is genuinely working, the annual budget is a significant non-event. Not because budgeting doesn’t matter - but because the numbers have already been stress-tested through the IBP cycle. The budget becomes a snapshot of a plan that’s already been lived in.
4. The meeting is mostly about what hasn’t happened yet.
Today’s fires deserve today’s attention and IBP handles them. But they don’t dominate. When IBP is working, the bulk of the meeting is focused on decisions that need to be made now to influence what happens in twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months.
When a cycle gets consumed by the next quarter and never lifts its head, the room feels it. There’s a quiet disappointment - a collective sense that the meeting did the wrong job this month. And steps get taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
That disappointment is the sign. It means the team knows what IBP is supposed to be for.
5. Someone pushes back - and gets thanked for it.
Watch what happens when a presenter tables their numbers and someone in the room disagrees. Not with the data - the data is what it is - but with the assumptions behind it, the direction it implies, or the outcome being proposed.
In a room where IBP is working, that challenge is welcomed. The debate happens in the open, gets settled before anyone leaves, and the person who pushed back doesn’t get managed or marginalised afterwards. They get thanked.
In rooms where IBP isn’t working, the challenge happens later - in the corridor, in a bilateral, in a carefully worded email. The meeting looked smooth. The real negotiation happened somewhere else.
There are more signs where these came from. But these five are a good start.
What’s on your list? I’d like to know - drop it in the comments.
I don’t write these to chase work. I write them because too many planning processes run on autopilot and nobody says anything. If this sparked a thought, that’s enough. If you want to talk about it, find me at planninglab.co.nz
#IBP #S&OP