Posts Tagged ‘Strategic Planning’

Have you ever gotten your family ready to go on vacation, packed the car, started driving down the road and asked “so where do you want to go on vacation this year kids?”  If your company doesn’t have an effective strategic planning process that is exactly what you are doing with your business.  Many companies spend a lot of time and effort developing strategic plans only to end up with a binder that nobody reads. The problem is that for a lot of companies, producing the big three ring binder is the only result they will get out of strategic planning.

The most effective strategic planning process is one developed by Bill Bean CEO of  Strategia and starts with a honest ground up appraisal of where your company is in every major facet of business. Getting this clear, honest feedback from your team, at all levels, will tell you where you really are. Next, you boil the feedback down into actionable items. This is all done prior to the big strategic planning meeting. Going into the meeting, every member of the strategic planning team has to read the results of the survey.  This preparation is critical to developing a realistic plan that address issues in the real world.

The first part of the strategic planning meeting starts with the CEO presenting their  vision for the next three to five years.  They cover the number of customers, P&L expectations, market penetration, or whatever makes sense for their business. After everyone understand where the ultimate destination is, the team reviews and discusses the issues that come from the surveys.  At this point, issues are defined and the team is ready to develop strategic action plans.

Strategic action plans are plans that will drive the change needed to take your company from where you are to where you want to be. When the team debates the plans the creative juices really start flowing.  When properly facilitated, ideas will bubble up from everyone on the team like never before and often results in real breakthrough thinking.  I’ve been in meetings where ideas discussed lead the CEO to dramatically increase strategic growth goals.

Actions dictated by this discussionbreak down into two groups. First is the “go do’s”. These are steps, tasks, or actions that don’t take planning or a team to accomplish, you just assign them to somebody and they have to go do them.  The second group are those things that require a plan to complete. Action plans are assigned to an individual in the room who will pull together a team and produce an specific action plan with milestones and delivery dates. The person assigned to lead the plan is responsible for delivering the anticipated result and this responsibility is incorporated into their personal evaluation for the year.

Action plans are written, submitted and approved usually within 30 days of the strategic planning meeting.  This is your Strategic Plan.  No big binder, just a collection of pragmatic action plans that are in alignment with the long term vision of the company, woven into the leader’s goals, and they are focused on the key opportunities and weaknesses of your organization.

The final and MOST IMPORTANT part the strategic planning process is to conduct quarterly strategic planning meetings, where strategic planning members update the team on the progress of their plan. These meetings should not take more than two hours. This will ensure that the team is focused on accomplishing the plans and driving the process.

Good strategic planning has enabled companies to experience dramatic, profitable growth in a controlled fashion, on purpose, not by accident.  You avoid disasters and take advantage of opportunities your competition didn’t know existed because your are driving the business with your head up, focused on where you want to be.  If your current strategic planning process is not delivering results, stop fooling around and start planning on purpose.