There are many different ways stakeholders can be involved, such as:. For further information on strategic planning and the other stages in the process, click on the links below:.
Step 3: Where are we going? Step 4: How will we get there? Step 5: Writing your plan. Individual contributors play just as big a role as someone on the executive team — and the cascaded responsibility and execution of a plan is what makes strategy execution possible. Your Website. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
A FREE downloadable guide to learn the basics of Key Performance Indicators with example metric sources for ever department of your organization. Goal Setting. More Like this. CEO and Executive Team The CEO and executive team play a big role in setting the foundation of a strategic plan by creating guiding organizational principles, articulating the strategic areas of focus, and creating the long-term goals that guide the organization to create aligned goals and actions to achieve its vision of success.
When you meet with your employees and any people outside of the company, remember that the discussions should encourage new ideas and thoughts. Involving your employees in the strategic planning process also means they receive a sense of accountability that can increase productivity.
By the end of the strategic planning process, you and your employees should have a clear direction of where you want the business to go in the future. These discussions and the planning process itself help put the business in the best position to succeed in the future. Strategic planning gives you and your business time to figure out how to grow over the next few years and how to address new opportunities and challenges. There are many strategic planning misconceptions.
Regardless of the size of your business, a strategic plan is beneficial. Whether you are a small business or a large corporation with hundreds or thousands of employees, strategic planning helps you make sure the company is headed in the right direction. The beginning phases of strategic planning focus on research and discussions. The strategic plan is a living document; it should change over time.
Reviewing and evaluating your strategic plan regularly will help keep you accountable and on track to achieve your goals and objectives. Successful strategic planning involves a team effort among you and your employees, as well as among you and your vendors and other outside people. Strategic planning also needs to be flexible. Each individual understands what makes the business stronger and what needs to be worked on. When it comes to strategic planning, you want to start it sooner rather than later.
Strategic planning is an ongoing commitment. The plan has to be implemented. Strategic plans also can go wrong if the goals and objectives you set are unrealistic. Every business owner wants to see their business grow and succeed, but if you set an overly ambitious growth rate, it could discourage you and your employees. A successful strategic plan requires commitment. Your entire team needs to be focused on the business and carrying out the strategic plan.
A strategic plan is a living document. Live by it. And regularly update your strategic plan. How often you should update your strategic plan depends on how your business works. If your business works in a fast-paced industry and can be affected by changing outside factors, you should review and update your strategic plan on a more frequent basis. For example, if your business operates within the ever-evolving tech industry, you will probably want to check on your strategic plan after each quarter.
At the very least, you should review your strategic plan every year. What you thought would be challenges and threats to your business a year ago may not be the same now. If outside factors are having a bigger impact on your business than you initially thought, you may have to change your objectives or goals. The regular review is a good opportunity to check back in with your employees.
Give them a summary of where the business currently stands. Talk with them to see if things have improved or if they still have concerns with the business—or if any of their initial concerns have changed.
After you review the strategic plan, share any changes with your team. You also can encourage your employees to continue working hard to achieve the goals and objectives in the strategic plan. What are the steps in strategic planning? When it comes to the strategic planning process, think of it as having three phases:. The discussion phase is meant to gather as much information, opinions, and input as possible.
Set up a regularly scheduled meeting with the employees and any other staff in your business who will be involved with strategic planning. Make sure you have an agenda and clear expectations of what you want to accomplish in each meeting. This will keep discussions on track and help prevent distractions.
In addition to regular meetings with your employees at your business, you can also gather information from people outside your company, like:. Getting their opinions on where they think the industry is going and what they think will change in the future can help you put together your strategic plan and determine where you want your business to be down the road.
You can also conduct a SWOT analysis. Your strengths should be pretty easy to identify. Every business has weaknesses and things to work on. Opportunities available to your business may be pretty clear, while identifying threats to your business can be more difficult. Speaking with people outside of the company should give you a good idea of where the industry could be heading and if there are any major competitors or challenges coming.
If you can identify a number of threats and challenges to your business early on, it puts you in a better position to address them if and when you encounter them down the road.
A strategic plan consists of five key components:. Decide with your employees what you will use to create the strategic plan. Are you going to purchase software to help you create and house the plan? Or are you going to create the plan yourself and save it in the cloud for easier access? Work with your employees to create goals and objectives for at least the next one to three years. And discuss how these goals and objectives will be measured and tracked. Equally important is having an action plan to achieve these goals and objectives.
A critical part of the strategic plan should address how often it will be reviewed and updated. Designate someone to be responsible for reviewing, updating, and sharing any changes with the rest of the company. If you developed meaningful objectives and action plans, they should help with regularly checking the strategic plan. For example, if your action plan requires you to put in sales numbers every quarter to track revenue, you could take that time to review the rest of the plan.
You can also set an alert to check the strategic plan on a regular basis. Reassess the situation and, if you need to, discuss the issues with your employees. Change the goal or objective and update the action plan to help you get back on track. You also may find that your small business has met a goal or objective earlier than you thought you would.
Discuss the ideas with your employees to see what they think is possible. Should you use strategic planning models or templates? Yes, in fact, a good strategic planning template is like a checklist. The template will include different sections for you to complete and help you cover a variety of topics.
Using a thorough template will help ensure you have a comprehensive strategic plan for your business. You can use computer software for your strategic planning template, or you can create your own with Microsoft Word or Excel. You can also download our Strategic Plan Example Template to use. Here are a few examples of different strategic plans:. The strategic plan is different from a business plan.
His tasks differ greatly from the mainly analytical role of the planner in the small company. The steps in a typical planning system represent an orderly, gradual process of commitment to certain strategic alternatives. Each step is, theoretically at least, linked to those preceding. Although few companies expect to achieve this financial linkage in narrowing the choices, all the parties involved in the process should understand the intended relationship between the cycles.
How fast this narrowing should be is a situational design question that depends on the particular corporate setting. A tight linkage between planning and budgeting indicates that more strategic commitments have been made at an earlier stage.
A loose linkage, on the other hand, implies that the narrowing process is slower and will occur mainly late, in the budgeting stage of the process. Exhibit II shows examples of slow versus rapid narrowing profiles.
Notice that a company that does little narrowing in the early stages faces the task of considering a large number of strategic issues in the budgeting stage. A small company with little diversity in its operations may wish to adopt an early or rapid narrowing process, since the functional and corporate executives involved are thoroughly familiar with the strategy of the few businesses in question.
Then functional managers can proceed directly to the development of action programs to continue implementation of that strategy. In a large company, linkage is usually looser and the narrowing process more gradual. During the start-up phase top management should give division managers plenty of time to devote to strategic thinking about their businesses—but the lower-level executives must remember to differentiate that activity from long-range budgeting, with its related requirement of divisional performance fulfillment.
As the system matures, however, management can gradually accelerate the narrowing process without jeopardizing the creative aspect of planning. A natural result of this progress is a more precise definition of the linkage between the planning cycle and the budgeting cycle.
The top executives believe that this development is a natural consequence of their increasingly cohesive strategic points of view. In sum, significant differences exist between the planning procedures used in the two types of companies we have examined. The issues that management must address, and our attempt to delineate what is good practice in small and large companies, are summarized in Exhibit III. In companies that are not very diversified and are functionally organized—as well as product units of diversified corporations—top management carries on the strategic thinking about the future of the business.
In such companies, a formal process to help organize that reflective activity is frequently unnecessary, in view of the few managers involved. Instead, formal strategic planning focuses on the development and review of innovative action programs to implement the strategy.
The planning system reflects that focus: goal setting is top-down, linkage to the budget is tight, and the staff planning officer plays a major role as cross-functional program analyst and environmental scanner. In companies that operate in several industrial sectors and are organized into product divisions, initiating a formal strategic planning process is a major task.
The first year or two of such an effort must be viewed as an investment in fostering a planning competence among division managers; the payoff in better decisions at the corporate level must wait until the system matures. If the planning system is to survive as more than an exercise in pushing numbers into the blank spaces on neatly designed forms, it must evolve rapidly along several dimensions.
A mature system, however, can be invaluable, helping both corporate and divisional executives make better and better-coordinated strategic decisions. Any company—indeed, any organization—is a dynamically evolving entity whose situational setting is subject to change. Accordingly, to remain effective, the design of the planning process is a continuous task requiring vigilance and insight on the part of management.
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