It is important to note that strategic planning is an exercise in gathering and documenting requirements about the past, present, and future of your business. It helps determine where you want to go over the next few years, how you are going to get there and how to recognize when you’ve arrived.
The most common strategic planning approaches use a strategic triangle and seek to align strategic agenda items with the tactical reality of the organization.
Starting from the top use the following seven steps:
1. Identify your mission statement. It is amazing how many organizations don’t take the time to develop this declaration. A mission statement is foundational to all strategic planning work. An effective mission statement describes what the company does, provides insight into client value and captures the essence of your business.
2. Create a vision of the future. A vision statement should look to the future. After all, you can’t get to where you want to go unless you know where you want to go. Think ahead to three to five years from now and write your story. What is it that your organization has achieved? Tighten that story into a clear, crisp sentence and share it.
3. Develop core values and guiding principles. Core values and Guiding principles are foundational to your entire organization. Guiding principles are a set of standard guidelines formed by the business that captures how your people act, work, make decisions, set priorities and conduct themselves. It is imperative to set and communicate core values and principles or else they will set themselves over time through employee habits.
One Day Strategic Planning Training Workshop with Richard Lannon
4. Create long-term goals and smart objectives. Goals are general statements outlining what you want to achieve to meet your mission and vision and address any issues you are facing. For every goal, it is important to identify strategies to achieve them. Objectives should be SMART; that means specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. It is important that you make a distinction between long-term goals and smart objectives for those aims.
5. Establish an action roadmap with timelines. An action Roadmap is a visual representation of your strategic planning items. It includes high-level agenda items, initiatives, champions and key elements. It includes the key areas that your organization will focus on to achieve its goals and objectives.
6. Build a communication plan. Communication plans should not be complicated and should be within your organization. It is important that time is spent determining the best approach for getting people informed as to what is planned and ensuring that they know impacts of not achieving the objectives. Consider printed plans, maps, high-level visuals, town hall sessions, etc. It is all about communication. Be visual, be creative.
7. Establish an implementation and monitoring plan. This is important to be successful. Organizations and teams fail because they don’t assign a top-notch resource to put together an implementation plan. Consider using a highly-skilled program manager or director to translate the strategic plan into tactical reality. Ensure that the rules of engagement are established and build a robust monitoring process that engages people in open dialogue centered around the actions that must be taken to be successful.
There are many Benefits
Strategic planning is an important part of every organization’s success. There are many advantages of any strategic planning approach that a business leader must consider. This means selecting the best framework for your organization and involving key stakeholders in the planning process.
Working together, as a team, your clarity of vision and purpose should be established: mission, vision, core values and guiding principles are part of that process. Linking to these items allow your people to set realistic goals and objectives that are consistent with the business requirements and organization’s needs.
This connection helps business leaders and their teams to identify strategic and tactical plans that need to be carried out in a defined time frame within the organization’s capacity. The key is to build a strategy map and road map that will be implemented. This requires the thoughtful integration of leading and lagging performance indicators that act as milestones, so you know if you are on track. As you move forward, work and communications plans must be established to enable the organization’s plans. These plans help you know where it is you want to go and develop your approach to get there.
These are the things that create value for the business leader when it comes to strategic planning. It is part of the S.E.T. Approach where business leaders and their teams formulate and prepare their strategic direction.
Final Thought
There are key elements that must go into strategic planning; if you do not have all the items to start with, then you must start with the strategic planning triangle. Everything that you do as an organization will come from your strategic plan. There are options: consider strategic planning training for your people on or engage a strategic facilitator to assist in the process.
