Carrying out cycle one

What "carrying out" requires

• The standard says the planned business must be carried out with reference to the business plan. You are not improvising an activity and writing a plan afterwards — you are executing a plan and recording where reality differed from it.
• The most valuable work during cycle one is not the selling. It is the recording, because everything the review needs has to be captured while it happens.

What to record, as it happens

Record	Why it matters later
Units produced and units sold	The core comparison with the plan; the difference is unsold stock
Every cost, with receipts	Actual unit cost, and the variance against the budget
Revenue, by day or session	Shows whether demand was steady or concentrated
Time taken for each step	Almost always exceeds the estimate; essential for refining the schedule
What went wrong, and when	Cannot be reconstructed later — write it the same day
Customer comments	The reason behind the numbers
Community feedback	The evidence for the well-being goal, which nothing else supplies
Photographs	Evidence of the activity, and useful for promotion in cycle two

• Keep a daily log: three lines a day, written by whoever was on duty. What we did, what happened, what we would change. This single habit is what separates a review with evidence from a review with recollections.

Sticking to the plan — and knowing when not to

• Follow the plan. The review compares outcomes with what was planned, so a group that abandoned the plan on day one has nothing to compare against.
• But a plan is not a straitjacket: if something is clearly failing, you may change it. When you do:
  • Record the change, the reason, and the time it was made.
  • Apply the priorities you set in the plan — that is what they are for.
• A recorded, reasoned mid-cycle change is good evidence. An unrecorded drift away from the plan is the thing that makes a review impossible.

Working with the community group during the cycle

• Keep the agreed contact person, and keep them informed — especially about anything that will affect what the organisation receives.
• If you cannot deliver what was promised, say so early. A community organisation can plan around a warning and cannot plan around a surprise.
• Collect their feedback during the cycle rather than only at the end, while the detail is fresh and while there is still time to act on it.

Common cycle one problems, and what they mean

• Sales are lower than forecast. Usually promotion (people did not know) or access (people knew but could not get it). Those need different fixes, so find out which before cycle two.
• Production took much longer than planned. Almost universal. Record the actual times per step — this is the most useful single input to the refined plan.
• Costs ran over. Identify whether the cause was price (an input cost more) or quantity (you used more than planned). Variance analysis applies here exactly as it does in AS90843.
• Someone was absent. If cover was not planned, note the cost — this is the strongest argument for the change you make in the people section.
• Quality was inconsistent. Usually means the standard was never defined, or nobody was assigned to check it.