Positioning for Successful Strategic Planning

Positioning for Successful Strategic Planning
by Paul Kirpes and Brian Amick

TPG Management Consulting

Strategic planning is one of those things your company or organization must do well. Successful strategic planning brings exceptional opportunities to get moving on the right path, avoid risks, act on previously unseen opportunities, understand strengths and weaknesses, address lingering issues, get to the core of problems affecting performance and discover new paths ahead. Strategic successful planning can also help to launch a major change initiative, strengthen your leadership team, and foster a “can do” spirit of cooperation and teamwork.

Or it can be a frustrating, unproductive waste of time. The results you get depend largely on how you prepare for it. Given the tremendous value potential of successful strategic planning, the opportunity costs of anything less than success are very high. Taking the time to prepare for strategic planning is therefore a worthwhile investment. A good first step toward positioning your company or organization for successful strategic planning is to create a vision and incorporate these 10 essential elements of strategic planning:

Bring people with diverse perspectives to help you think differently
People with different experience and viewpoints will help you see opportunities and challenges your team may miss because of the common view they share through working together. Be sure to include people who think critically and are willing to challenge the status quo. Bringing different perspectives will help you to quickly identify and explore alternative solution paths. The idea here is to find ways to think differently. Consider bringing outside experts to participate in the planning process, provided they are willing to actively challenge the discussion. Also, consider using on-line collaborative planning tools if your organization is geographically dispersed.
Be absolutely clear on what matters most
If you’re not absolutely certain about the value proposition of core products, your customers, or your competitive advantage, you need to figure it out quickly. Clarity on these fundamentals is a critical prerequisite to effective planning.
Think very long term, then work backward to a practical near-term planning horizon
Profitability over a very long term requires foresight and, in most cases, early recognition and action on future or emerging market threats. One way to evaluate long term profit risk is to measure stakeholder impact to input and output value streams (with stakeholders defined in very broad terms). This will help you to identify and address potential market impacts that are not factors in current profitability models. You may find that there are economical steps you can take now to turn potential long term negative impacts into current and long term profit.
Begin with an inspiring vision for success
Before you set a date on the calendar, be able to explain what “really effective” strategic planning means to you in terms of expected outcomes. Then set your goals high and launch the planning effort in a way that provides vision and context for participants, and inspires everyone to bring their best game to the effort. If your company or organization has been doing strategic planning the same way for a long time, you may need to break from established patterns to explore your potential.
Engineer for implementation
The greatest plan won’t work if it can’t be implemented. Build in “implement-ability” from design. In practical terms, this means defining strategic objectives with some thought about how they will be implemented. This may also mean going the extra step or two in thinking strategies through. Including senior project management skill sets among the strategy team may prove beneficial. Before you consider the strategic planning effort “complete,” be sure you can integrate it into work currently in progress; this will help you to avoid resource conflicts and get the effort off to a good start.
Get out of your own way
With a critical and objective eye, look for internal barriers to making the changes you need – changes you may have inadvertently created. Your budgeting process, for example, may perpetuate an inefficient allocation of resources. Loose controls on authorizing project-based work, for example, may lead the organization to over-allocate resources to less-than-strategic priorities. Incentive compensation programs may need to be revised to ensure all employees are rewarded for the performance you need. Look also at the method by which your key resources are assigned to the accomplishment of strategic objectives; the process may result in assignments that optimize business unit objectives at the expense of the company overall.
Develop a communication plan to articulate appropriate messages to your audiences
If the outcome of your strategic planning efforts results in change, you will need to tell the story to people in different ways depending on their roles. A well-designed communication plan can substantially reduce stress, implementation costs and timelines. By knowing what messages go to whom when, you can deliver more effective communication with less work. This also enables you to take advantage of events and to couple “tough” messages with “good” ones. Consider the communication plan part of the strategic planning effort. Including a communication expert can help make the translation faster.
Step back and conduct a “sanity check”
Be sure get a second – or third or fourth – opinion about the evolving strategies. Engage trusted advisors of your choosing in meaningful dialogue about alternative courses of action and related risks. Consider a trial communication to a select employee, supplier, or customer group. You may also want to evaluate the long-term sustainability and the “social bottom line” impact of your new strategies; failure to do so may result in missed opportunities or may negatively impact your ability to achieve expected results in the long term.
Strengthen strategy planning and implementation capabilities
Just as it is important to get good at building really effective strategic plans, it is equally as important to get good at implementing strategies. World class performance in executing strategies requires mature enterprise project management capabilities, change leadership skills, and integrated communication. Strengthening project management skills and ensuring consistent practices across the company helps executives make informed trade-off decisions among projects in different business units. A common example is deciding whether to move a key resource off of a project important to one business unit to a strategic project that is more important to the overall company. In addition, consistent enterprise project management practices enable executives to treat the total investment of people and dollars in projects as a portfolio of investments and actively manage strategy implementation.
Keep your eye on the ball
Monitor strategy implementation progress quantitatively, objectively, and regularly to maintain focus on the execution of your strategies and to react quickly if changes are needed. Develop measurement metrics that are most appropriate for your company or organization. Consider putting into place a Balanced Scorecard or other performance management system if your company would benefit from additional structure for measuring progress on strategic objectives. However you do it, don’t lose track of the actual progress toward the results you expect.

Conclusion

Position your company or organization for successful strategic planning by beginning with a vision that challenges current thinking and sets high expectations for outcomes. Your preparation for strategic planning will have a significant effect on outcomes, so incorporating these 10 rules into your planning will help your organization get the most out of the investment and the opportunity.