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| Strategic Planning
for Fun and Profit © Dr. Terry J. van der Werff, CMC Our goal in these sessions on strategic planning is to give you the tools to develop your own company's strategic plan. Session
1. What It Is and Is Not - Benefits and Limitations
For other planning documents on our Web site, click below: Passionate Planning (some philosophy
about planning) This is the first of a series on strategic planning – to appear about every three weeks – for adaptation to your own organization. Our goal in presenting this series is to allow you sketch a template for your own organization's strategic plan. Strategic planning is a powerful tool for laying out the template or roadmap for future success and should be in every manager's toolkit. In this series we shall look at:
WHAT IS STRATEGIC PLANNING? Strategic planning is a disciplined, creative process for determining how to take your organization from where it is today to where you wish it to be in the future. Strategic planning is fundamentally a decision making process, based on asking simple (but deep) questions, analyzing the range of answers, and choosing among them:
What do we do?
Where are we going? This process encompasses the entire spectrum of issues an organization faces, ranging from the big ones of who you are, what you do, and what your corporate values are to the smaller but equally important ones that connect the focus on the future with the work that must be performed soon to move the organization forward. WHAT ARE ITS BENEFITS? The benefits of strategic planning are manifold since it:
The above benefits can be encapsulated in a single statement: Strategic planning aligns the total organization –
people, processes, and resources – with a clear, compelling, and
desired future state. While the benefits are manifold, unfortunately so so its limitations:
WHAT STRATEGIC PLANNING IS AND IS NOT "Strategic planning determines where your organization should be going so that all organizational efforts can be pointed in that direction." (Below, Morrisey & Acomb) IS IS NOT
A fine primer on strategic planning was written by Gay Gooderham, CMA, CMC, published in May, 1998, in "CMA Magazine" of the Society of Management Accountants of Canada, and reprinted in the October, 1998, "Focus on Strategy" newsletter of The Toronto Society for Strategic Management. Below are brief summaries of the eight myths, in her words as much as possible. Myth 1. You need a documented plan. The value of planning is not the plan itself, but rather in developing a common language, articulating assumptions, and learning to make decisions together. Myth 2. A plan can describe all the things that must be done to succeed. Strategy sets the direction and context for subsequent actions and decisions by all in order to close the gap between where the organization is now and where it would like to be. Myth 3. Strategic planning is a formal, analytical process. Strategy is inherently a creative process, dealing with complexity and ambiguity. The plan is never finished - it is a living document. Myth 4. Plans are built solely on facts and hard data. A strategy is a set of assumptions about how the world behaves. Facts and hard data are used to test its validity. Myth 5. The planning cycle runs on your financial calendar. While planning may be part of an organization's annual cycle, whenever major events and changes occur, the plan should be immediately reexamined to test for the continued validity of its underlying assumptions. Myth 6. The work is over when the plan is done. Strategy must be communicated, put into action, and integrated with daily decision making. Myth 7. There is one right strategy. Strategy is about identifying and creating choices through conversations between stakeholders. Myth 8. There is one best process for building strategies. The key to successful planning is fitting the tools and techniques of planning with the organization's culture, capabilities, business environment, and desired outcome and then sticking with those tools and techniques for an extended period. Thank you, Gay, for these insights. We outline a basic strategic planning model, suggest the composition of the planning team, and comment on the process. The strategic planning model we have found useful for most companies has three phases:
Meaning of the Strategic Plan The plan focusses on the future. It provides a common direction for everyone, is an effective recruiting tool, can be shared with clients and prospects for marketing and with suppliers for effectiveness, and gives you the ability to track progress. A strategic plan is a living document, not something to be thrown on a shelf. Strategic Planning Team The ideal size of a strategic planning team is 6-12 members plus an outside facilitator. Each team member should be chosen to represent different segments of the company, not just direct reports to the CEO. All members should have the respect of their peers. Senior, middle, and front line management should be represented. Members do not wear their "departmental hats;" they wear the "company hat" during the planning deliberations. One member, probably a younger one on the "fast track," should be charged with handling the internal logistical details for the planning process. An outside facilitator should be used to bring experience in the planning process, to give perspective on the future, and to allow all team members to work as equals. The CEO has a prominent role in the planning team, sets
the context, endorses the result, but remains enough in the background
that the ideas of others may emerge. This is not an easy task for
most CEO's and is another compelling reason for using a skilled outside
facilitator. Thoughts About the Strategic Planning Process Openness. The strategic planning process should be an open one within the company. While it is usually not practical to have everyone who wishes to attend the planning meetings, the ongoing results should be available to all employees, for example, via the company's intranet, through broadcast e-mail, or simply a loose-leaf binder at the receptionist's desk. Critiques and suggestions should be welcomed from all. Iterative. While there is an underlying logic and flow to the strategic planning process, the plain fact is that planning is a highly iterative process. Almost at every step, the team must revisit earlier steps to ensure consistency and revise accordingly. Time commitment. For a typical company, 3-6 months is required to develop a strategic plan, with 6-10 all-day meetings and a couple two-day retreats. Team members must also work on the plan between meetings, so the CEO must ensure they are given the "space" to permit their concentrated efforts and to encourage their personal commitment to both the process and the end Big thoughts. If there is ever a time to decouple
everyone from the everyday concerns of running the business and to think
truly big thoughts, this is the time to do it. The CEO and outside
facilitator both have an obligation to see this is done by all. Clarifying your company's vision creates a lodestar to lock onto, inspire your efforts, and give meaning to your very existence. Strategic thinking - the first of three phases in the strategic planning model - provides the basis for subsequent planning and guides you in dealing with strategic issues as they arise later. It embraces the planning bedrock of vision, values, and mission and the grand strategy. Vision is the first element in the planning bedrock. It is the fundamental reason your company exists - the why of your being. Vision is crucial in laying a solid foundation to guide the future development of the company. Vision is the concrete statement of your ultimate dreams for the company or for the world that you can impact through it. Clarifying one's vision is a deceptively difficult task. Ideally, it should be:
Here are a few examples from our own clients: To enhance [our people's] cultural and economic freedoms. To be the provider of choice for quality services worldwide. To be the premier provider of Total Project Services for the world's 21st Century infrastructure. A clean world.
Your Homework - Clarify Your Vision For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to draft a vision for your company. Set aside a few quiet hours away from the office and home. Think deeply about why you are in business. Jot down the individual words that come to mind as you ponder the distant future. Draft a short statement that captures your thoughts. Later share it with some colleagues and ask for their feedback. Revise the vision statement accordingly. Click
here to send us your vision for a prompt, free,
and completely confidential critique. Ultimately your company rises or falls by the values you live by in all circumstances. Strategic thinking - the first of three phases in the strategic planning model - provides the basis for subsequent planning and guides you in dealing with strategic issues as they arise later. It embraces the planning bedrock of vision, values, and mission and the grand strategy. Values are the second element in the planning bedrock. They reflect your character and your corporate culture - the how you do what you do. Values are long-lasting. They affect all that you do. Values are your convictions on how business is to be conducted and people are to be treated, inside and outside the company. Companies are like people. The good ones stand for something positive and know why they stand for it. They live out their values consistently day to day, impacting others by their example. Ideally, values should be:
It is relatively easy to develop a list of important values. It is hard to home in on the few that make a difference in your company. It is harder still to capture the nuances these values evoke in the minds of your employees. Here are a few examples from our own clients and others: Engineering
and architecture firm Telecommunications
company McKinsey and
Company Johnson and
Johnson Your Homework - Describe Your Values For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to list and describe the values your company holds dear. As with your vision, set aside a few hours away from the office and home. Think introspectively about how people behave in your company. Jot down those positive values that crop up over and over in varied circumstances. Narrow the list to only 3-5. Now (the toughest part) write a short phrase or sentence that describes how people understand each value. Later share these with colleagues and ask for their feedback. Revise the values list and descriptions accordingly. Click
here to send us your values for a prompt, free,
and completely confidential critique. Session 6 - Planning Bedrock: Mission Your company's mission clarifies what you do and guides your everyday efforts and decision making. Strategic thinking - the first of three phases in the strategic planning model - provides the basis for subsequent planning and guides you in dealing with strategic issues as they arise later. It embraces the planning bedrock of vision, values, and mission and the grand strategy. Mission is the third element in the planning bedrock. It translates your vision and values into something tangible - the what of your existence. Mission guides your everyday efforts and is the touchstone for decision making. Mission is the products or services you provide, for whom, where, and how. Clarifying your mission is vitally important, precisely because it forces you to state unambiguously what you do. Equally important, it also defines what you do not do! Ideally, your mission should be:
Here are a few examples from our own clients and others: To provide world-class engineering, architecture, and related services in an expanding global market. To sell, service, and operate proprietary waste combustion, energy recovery, and recycling facilities throughout the world. To provide affordable, state of the art telecommunications services throughout the Arctic Slope. To provide professional consulting services to continuously improve the performance of our clients’ processes, products, people, and profits. (Juran Institute) To report accurately and fairly the affairs of Asia in all spheres of human activity, to see the world from an Asian perspective, to be Asia's voice in the world. (AsiaWeek) To serve physicians worldwide with high quality products
for cardiovascular and vascular care. (St. Jude Medical) Clarifying Your Company's Mission Perhaps the easiest way to put your arms around what your mission should be is by answering a series of questions. This is a common approach, but I am particularly indebted to the example set by George Morrisey, a strategic consultant of the first order. 1a. What business(es) are we in? 1b. What business(es) could we be in? 1c. What business(es) should we be in? 1d. What business(es) should we not be in? 2. What is unique or distinctive about us? 3. Who are and should be our principal customers, clients, or users? 4. What are and should be our principal market segments? 5. What are and should be our principal products and services? 6. How do we and should we distribute our products and services? 7. How has our business changed in the last three to five years? 8. How has our industry changed in the last three to five years? 9. How is our business likely to change in the next three to five years? 10. How is our industry likely to change in the next three to five years? 11. What are the key measures of
our success and how do we use them? Your Homework - Define Your Mission For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to define the mission of your company. This is best done in quiet hours away from the office and home.
Click here to send us your mission for a prompt, free, and completely confidential critique. Your company's driving force is the dominant factor influencing your decision making and central to setting your strategy. A powerful technique for determining your organization’s strategy (the ultimate goal of strategic planning) is to consider its driving force, a concept first introduced by Tregoe and Zimmerman in 1980. They define the driving force as “the primary determiner of the scope of future products and markets.” Your driving force is the dominant factor that most influences the making of major decisions. In 1989 Tregoe, Zimmerman, Smith, and Tobia revisited the driving force concept and reduced the nine of 1980 to eight, while still noting the potential for other driving forces in special situations. In my own strategic planning engagements, the following 15 driving forces seem to cover most organizations, with examples of companies allied with each driving force.
So how do you proceed to discover your driving force? Begin by pruning the above list of all those driving forces that simply don't apply. For example, if you only offer services, strike "products offered" from the list. After eliminating the obvious ones, then ask yourself the opposite question: is there is another driving force that cannot be readily subsumed inside one of those remaining on the list? If not, then add it. You should now have a list of 6-8 driving forces to consider. Now the real fun begins, not to mention hard mental effort, because every one of the remaining driving forces is important in some degree to the success of your company. Every company needs to have sufficient human resources and technology to deliver a product or service to meet a particular market's needs in a profitable manner. That's not the point. The point of the exercise is to rank these in order of importance. A structured ranking approach is best. Perhaps the simplest means to this end is to consider them in pair-wise progression. That is, take driving force #1 and compare it with driving force #2, and decide which is more important to your company in the actual making of major decisions and setting of important policies. Next, compare #1 with #3, and then #1 with #4, until #1 has been compared with all the remaining driving forces. Now take driving force #2 and compare it with driving force #3 and then with #4, etc. The number of pair-wise comparisons grows rapidly with the number of driving forces. For 6 driving forces, there are 15 comparisons. For 8 driving forces, there are 28, and for 10 driving forces, there are 45. You can readily see the advantages to taking some care in the selection of the initial driving forces to be considered. My experience is that some comparisons of relative importance are "no brainers" and take only a few minutes for the planning team to reach consensus. Other comparisons can take a half hour or more. Altogether, with 6-8 driving forces to compare, you should expect to spend two-three hours to reach your final list of driving forces ranked in order of importance. The effort you expend in putting this list together, and it is effort, will repay itself many times before the planning process is over. In our next session, we'll take the driving force and craft a governing or grand strategy for your future from it. Your Homework - Identify and Rank Your Driving Forces For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to identify and rank the driving forces for your company. To assist you in this task, click here to obtain a simple spreadsheet which keeps track of your pair-wise comparisons, which has been adapted from George Morrisey's work. Type "Driving force decision matrix" in the subject field. Click here to send us your driving forces for a prompt, free, and completely confidential critique. Your company's strategy is the direction you choose to follow to reach your vision and is central to all business decisions. Formulation of your strategy is the last of the four "big" statements that constitute the strategic thinking portion of strategic planning. They set the stage for the more analytical portion of planning and ultimately for the setting of strategic objectives. Let's review the three elements of the planning bedrock first:
It is strategy that connects the present to the future. Strategy is a direction, a pathway, chosen from amongst many possibilities. It is intimately connected to, indeed, it is based on your planning bedrock: Strategy is the particular means by which you seek to fulfill your mission and to move toward your vision, within the context of your values. Your strategy flows from your driving force, a concept introduced last time, which is your “primary determiner of the scope of future products and markets.” (Tregoe and Zimmerman, 1980) Your driving force is the dominant factor in making your major decisions. The secondary or tertiary driving forces can legitimately be considered as decision influencers and can find their way into your strategy statement if they are strong enough. The driving force analysis is not the only way to determine strategy, but it certainly is the most thorough and analytical, even if only to confirm the obvious. Experience, however, suggests that the "obvious" isn't always so. The extra time expended to be more analytical is usually worthwhile. Even with a sure confidence in the validity of your driving force, it is still a matter of great creativity to select a strategy that is consistent with your vision, values, and mission. Let's look at several examples to help clarify the concepts behind the formulation of strategy.
In future sessions, we'll take a detailed look at
your internal and external influences, so that you can determine which
factors are most important in setting your strategic objectives. Your Homework - Draft Your Strategy For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to draft a strategy for your company. You may find it easiest to begin by listing several pathways that could move you toward your vision, with each pathway based on or strongly connected to your driving force. Then test these against your mission and values to eliminate those that are inconsistent with one or the other. Finally, test the remaining pathways against one another and form a judgment about which will be most effective in reaching your vision, recognizing this will be years away. Click here to send us your strategy for a prompt, free, and completely confidential critique. Session 9 - Situational Assessment Once the big issues of vision, values, mission, and strategy have been determined, it is time to assess the internal and external factors affecting your business. A situational assessment requires a hard-headed look at all the factors affecting the future success of your business, as they relate to your vision, values, mission, and strategy. Once these are identified, you then select those factors which are most critical and develop long-term objectives to address them. There are several approaches we could use for the situational assessment. In this session, however, we will follow the SLOT assessment, the most popular situational assessment method and the most highly structured. It looks at all the positive and negative factors inside and outside your organization that affect your success. By definition, strengths and limitations are considered to be internal factors, over which you have some measure of control. Also by definition, opportunities and threats are considered to be external factors, over which you have essentially no control.. Internal factors:External
factors: In the traditional planning literature the term normally employed is SWOT, rather than SLOT, with the W denoting weaknesses. Limitations is a softer term in that it indicates merely the absence of a strength, not necessarily the presence of a weakness. Until encountering this usage of "limitations" by Morrisey, I had frequently used “baggage” instead of weaknesses. Strengths are the qualities that enable you to fulfill your organization’s mission. They can be either tangible or intangible. They are what you do well, the qualities your employees possess (individually and as a team), and the unique characteristics that give your organization its coherence. They fall into four broad categories:
Examples of strengths:
Limitations are the qualities that keep you from fulfilling your mission and reaching your full potential. They are those activities, services, or other factors that do not meet the standards you feel should be met. They are controllable. You want to eliminate or minimize them. They fall into the same four broad categories as above. Examples of limitations:
Opportunities are presented by the environment within which your organization operates. Selecting the targets that will best serve your clients while bringing you the results you desire is not an easy task. Developing plans to address opportunities begins with a list of those available to you. They fall into four broad categories:
Examples of opportunities:
Threats are external to your organization. They compound your vulnerability when they relate to your limitations. They are not controllable. When a threat comes, your stability and survival can be at stake! They fall into the same four broad categories as above. Examples of threats:
Note that some factors can appear on opposite lists.
Your Homework - Assess Your Strengths, Limitations, Opportunities & Threats For those who are sketching a strategic plan through
these sessions, your homework is to assess your company's strengths,
limitations, opportunities, and threats. This is essentially
a brainstorming process, with easily ten to twenty items being listed
in each of the four categories.
Click here to send us your strengths, limitations,
opportunities, and threats for a prompt, free, and completely confidential
critique. A simple process for selecting your 5-7 critical issues to focus your strategic plan is presented. Last time we used the SLOT (strengths, limitations, opportunities, threats) methodology to conduct a situational assessment. It's common to produce many dozens of issues that need addressing, variations of which may be found on several of the four categories. You must now winnow these many dozens of issues to a half dozen critical issues in order to tighten the focus of your strategic plan. If you select too many, this focus is severely diluted and subsequent actions will bear less fruit. The simpler you do this prioritization the better. Over the past quarter century I have probably tried 20 different scoring methods to rank order the importance of issues. They all tend to give the same general ranking, which has led me to prefer the simplest ranking system possible (within the culture of the company). Here's my preferred approach. Step 1. Discuss. At this stage there are probably 10 or 15 sheets of butcher paper stuck on the walls full of issues for all to see. Discuss the similarities and contrasts of the issues listed to ensure everyone understands what is behind each. This will usually lead to some consolidation or restatement of issues. Step 2. Vote. When this discussion, which might take 30 minutes to a couple hours, starts to repeat itself, it's take to call a halt and vote. I prefer the simple voting technique of giving each strategic planning team member six sticky dots to place on their preferred issues. Each person has the option of placing two of their dots on a specially dear issue. Step 3. Tally the votes & discuss. When the voting is complete, which may take 15-30 minutes due to side discussions on nuanced differences between issues, the facilitator counts up the votes for each issue. Normally 2 or 3 issues will stand out as paramount, another 2 or 3 are close behind, and most of the others receive few or no votes. It's thus easy to identify the top 4 or 5. Similar issues have have caused team members to "split" their votes, which usually leads to someone suggesting combining the issues in different way which has the support of the team, thereby elevating its ranking. This tallying of votes and combining of issues usually takes a half hour or so. Step 4. Restate the critical issues. The facilitator must now ensure that the critical issues, which may have taken on several different forms in the earlier steps, are now stated clearly. Step 5. CEO's vote. The CEO has a unique perspective of the future of the company and the critical issues it faces. Once the team has settled on its handful of critical issues, the CEO should be invited to add any issue he or she feels belongs on the critical issues list. My experience is that the CEO, who of course has been party to all the discussions, adds another critical issue about half the time, always to the benefit of the ultimate strategic plan. Step 6. Stabilize the critical issues.
The facilitator restates the 5-7 critical issues and stresses that all
subsequent planning will be done solely around these issues. No
other issues will be the subject of the company's strategic focus, nor
will they be discussed during the remainder of the strategic planning
process. Your Homework - Draft Your Critical Issues For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to winnow the issues you identified last time for your company to 5-7 critical issues. Feel free to do this using whatever decision making process your company's culture prefers. However, I can attest the above six step process works equally well for companies ranging in size from a half dozen total employees to Fortune 500 companies. Click
here to send us your criticqal issues for a
prompt, free, and completely confidential critique. The strategic planning tire meets the road when you develop 6-8 strategic objectives to pursue in the coming years. You have come a long way in your planning process and are nearing the finish line. In the last session you identified 5-7 critical issues facing your company. In this session you will develop specific, measurable strategic objectives to pursue in the coming years which address these critical issues. Most authors refer to these as "long-term objectives," as I did for many years. Eventually, I came to realize that for most companies, especially those doing their first strategic plan, one-third or more of the objectives were short-term, i.e. 6-18 months. That did not make them any less strategic; it just made them shorter than long-term objectives with timeframes of 3-5 years or more. Hence, my adoption of strategic objectives. Strategic objectives typically, though not always (see above), have multi-year timeframes for their achievement and are multi-functional, i.e. they require concerted efforts by people from many different parts of your company. Strategic objectives (SO's) begin with such words
as "to have," "to be," "to become," or "to achieve" and end with a specific
year by which the SO will be met. Developing Your Strategic Objectives You develop your strategic with reference solely to the critical issues you identified in the last session. Begin with the highest priority critical issue and discuss ways to address it. When your ideas begin to gel, write an SO in the above format. Make them positive in concept and wording. Focus on the achievement to come, not on the shortcoming or problem in the present. Since you might draft two or three SO's for each critical issue, you can easily end up with 15-25 potential SO's. Once again, you must prioritize them and choose 6-8 SO's to drive the future development of your company. This discussion and prioritization process is markedly similar to the one you used in settling on your critical issues, so I advise following that technique. When you have competed this prioritization, you may well find that one or more of the critical issues has no associated strategic objective. Don't worry! If you have followed the process well, then the 6-8 SO's you chose are the best ones. Resist with a passion the temptation to add more SO's so that all critical issues are addressed, which can easily balloon the SO's to a dozen or more. There is no quicker way to kill the vitality of a strategic plan than this! The only way for SO's to be special and to serve as focal points for your company's development is to have few of them. Otherwise, efforts are diluted, and achievements are diminished. As a final step, George Morrisey suggests validating your SO's against four criteria: 1. Is it measurable or verifiable?
To this list I would add the following: 5. Does it stretch your people
without breaking them? Examples of Strategic Objectives To give you some sense of what strategic objectives look like for real companies, the following have been drawn from my clients over the past several years, grouped by type of SO rather than by client. Each SO ended with a date phrase such as "by 2001." These dates have been dropped here. You can assume a short-term sounding SO had a date for achievement soon after the completion of the plan. Indeed, sometimes an SO was achieved before the strategic plan was formally adopted and disseminated! Growth Management Safety Administrative Employees Natural resources Physical plant Quality Your Homework - Draft Your Strategic Objectives For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to develop 6-8 specific, measurable strategic objectives from your critical issues. Use the prioritization process from the last session. Click
here to send us your strategic objectives for
a prompt, free, and completely confidential critique. The strategic action milestones link your objectives to your people and your resources. Strategic planning sets the context for the organization to do certain things. These are ultimately encapsulated in strategic action milestone summaries (SAM’s) which identify the 4-8 milestones – major events, phases, or accomplishments – that must take place in an orderly fashion for the SO’s to be met, who will be responsible for each, when they are to be accomplished, and what they will cost in both time and money. SAM’s provide the final link from mission, strategy, and objectives to two vitally important factors:
There is one SAM summary for each SO. With most of our clients, a “Strategic Action Milestone Summary” template based on a simple spreadsheet format helps to visualize and organize the flow of effort and resources to achieve each strategic objective. Some companies who routinely use project management software find a project management template better meets their needs. (We would be happy to provide these templates to anyone interested.) Responsible person. While each milestone (by definition) represents a significant accomplishment and will in all likelihood involve many people, one person is to be charged with orchestrating its achievement. Schedule. Each milestone’s achievement needs to be scheduled. In early drafts, one normally targets quarters for starting and completing one. When all SAM’s have been drafted, then the personnel and financial resource loading can be determined and adjusted accordingly. Resources required. Capital resources are equipment, facilities, acquisitions, or other major investments not covered in the normal budget. Operating resources are other needed monies not covered in the normal budget. Consultants and other outside service providers would fall under operating resources. Human resources refer to the internal hours to complete the milestone. If staff must be added to the organization, their costs must be included in the operating column. Report progress to is the person or, in some cases,
the board or other policy group that the responsible person will periodically
report progress to and receive support and resources from. Your Homework - Draft Your Strategic Action Milestones Summaries For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to develop a strategic action milestone summary for each of your strategic objectives. Remember that you need not know right now specifically how to reach a given milestone. Those details can be determined at a later date as you get closer to beginning the effort on a particular milestone. Click
here to send us your strategic action milestones
for a prompt, free, and completely confidential critique.
The objective of strategic planning is ultimately to act. Here's what to consider as you roll out your plan for implementation. Implement. This point seems to be obvious, but is terribly important. The hardest part of strategic planning is to do what you planned and to be alert to the inevitable opportunities for action that are clearly better than your plan (and to adjust your plan accordingly). Implementation takes a certain amount of discipline, will, and change from your usual business practices. The aim is to have your strategy deeply and seamlessly embedded in your daily, weekly, and monthly routine. The plan should guide your activities, underlying all you do. Communicate. It is my strong bias that your strategic plan is a public document. It should be shared with everyone in your company, as well as with other stakeholders – suppliers and subcontractors, customers and clients, alliance partners, community and govern-ment officials. The more people who know what you are trying to achieve, the more ideas will bubble up, sometimes from unexpected places. Since this is a public document, put some effort into making it attractive, something people can take pride in. A 5 ½ by 8 ½ booklet is easy to produce and can be designed in an eye catching manner to invite reading, which, after all, is the point of communicating it. Appendices which might include your strategic action milestones or budgetary information are not part of the public document. Monitor. The monitoring process needs to be institutionalized as much as possible. Specific tasks should be part of the agenda of relevant management meetings. At the least, it should be part of a monthly agenda. A formal progress review should be held quarterly. This should include not only the obvious checking of progress against the plan, but also testing of the underlying assumptions of the plan, the continued validity of the objectives, and unanticipated events which might need to be reflected in the plan. Update. A more thorough review and update should take place annually, preferably in a retreat setting, so that it can provide the backdrop to the annual budget process most organizations engage in. In effect, the strategic plan becomes a “rolling five year plan.” In practice, however, most companies do not need to do a thorough update and republish the plan annually. If well executed, a strategic plan starts becoming “stale” about the third year and should be redone entirely from scratch. If this is not done, a planning mindset – one of the most important products of the whole exercise – will be lost for a decade. When you redo your plan, you will generally find little
change in the big issues – your values, vision, mission, and grand
strategy – and even then, changes will tend to be in clarifying
wording, rather than wholesale changing of concepts. Most changes
will be in the critical issues and objectives, for, after all, both the
external world marches on and you have achieved many of the objectives
laid out in the plan. Your Homework - Draft Your Rollout and Implementation Plan For those who are sketching a strategic plan through these sessions, your homework is to outline exactly how you intend to implement, communicate, monitor, and update your strategic plan. Click
here to send us your rollout and implementation
plan for a prompt, free, and completely confidential critique.
Your Strategic Future You have come a long way over the past few months as we have explored together how to develop a strategic vision based on your values and to select objectives for achievement. My thanks to you for following this series. I leave you with my best wishes for Happy Strategic Planning!
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