Business Plan and its importance

What is a business plan?
Simply defined, a business plan is a document that tells an individual or company where it is today, where it want to go tomorrow, and how you plan to get there.

In today's business world, a need of a business plan has increased dramatically. Even if it is not required, it expresses an important need. There are alot of benefits of a business plan. One, it allows one to look into one's idea and criticize it for fatal flaws that can ruin one's investment in future. Second, it forces one to think about one's beliefs and insight of a certain idea and look to see if it is worth investing one's time and efforts into it. It also helps to raise one's confidence by allowing him/her to clarify and eliminate errors in one's understanding. A business plan also shows one's ability to communicate effectively with other individuals in the industry, like investors, customers, and suppliers. Most importantly, investors want to see how capable an individual they are betting their savings on is? Thats why the first question one is asked, when they go to bank or an investor for money is "Where is your business plan?" Simply, it is a company gameplan.
On the other hand, a business plan also has some negatives. The most important of them is time, it is very time consuming. Companies today don't want to spend there precious time planning while they can be engaged in other important activities. This is so important for a business owner to decide how much time they want to spend planning. Because by spending too much time planning one can miss the window of opportunity that was open for them, while they were planning. If they plan too little, they can end up creating a mess for themselves very early moment of their operations. Secondly, a business plan can limit a company from expanding or moving away in a better direction because of the pressure from investors and industry environment.

So, the question remains, Is business plan relevant?
There just don't seem to be any correct answer to this. It all depends on the situation in the market. Even if you had the best plan of all, you may still fail to succeed.