Businesses often make two fundamental mistakes when it comes to strategic planning, namely:
- Approaching strategy as a standalone, scheduled activity rather than a continuous process, and secondly,
- Attempting to develop it with the input of senior business managers only, rather than functional experts across all levels of the organization.
These errors occur because of a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of strategic planning. The two things we must remember for success focus on processes and people, as follows:
- Strategic planning is a continuous business process (with the appropriate measures of success) and;
- Any business strategy should be developed with subject matter experts from across the entire organization. These experts won’t always be managers by any means – in fact, they may be your most junior staff!
Why do these things matter?
Businesses that fail with their strategy tend to view it as another project that is tackled as part of an annual calendar of business activities. But strategy should be a living and breathing process that drives the entire direction of the organization – not simply another BAU activity that gathers dust when another operational priority comes along!
Equally, it is vital to get everyone involved in your strategy across the organization. This is because the people that lead your business are often far removed from the issues and experiences that most closely impact your customers. To create a successful strategy, you need to find the true experts in the business – however junior they might be.
For example, it is often the case that your functional experts may work on the front line – from IT and systems through to warehouse management. Consider customer experience for example. Your frontline call center teams will have the most accurate view of what is delighting or frustrating your customers. Your customer helpline handler will understand customer pain points perhaps even more than the department director! So include them in the process and draw out their expertise and creative ideas.
To help make this process of engagement and involvement across the entire organization easier, it is important to ensure that every employee has personal objectives that are designed to support the delivery of your business’s strategic objectives. This ensures that their efforts actually result in desired strategic change. It also makes it far easier for your business to recognize and reward great performance – seeing that it makes a measurable difference to the company’s intended direction.
The Intrafocus Strategic Planning Process
The prospect of developing and implementing a continuous strategic process can be overwhelming, especially for organizations that are new to it. How do you begin? What are the key stages? What is essential for success?
The Intrafocus Strategic Planning Process makes it easy. Created by our strategy experts, it provides a powerful but simple blueprint for all organizations to use – enabling businesses to move from the planning stage to the all-important implementation (and evaluation) phase. This is vital because a lot of organizations find it easy enough to write plans… but delivering them is a different matter!
The process stages:
The Strategic Planning Process (SPP) works through a structured seven-stage process as follows:
- Foundational Elements – or defining your Core Values, Vision, and Purpose.
- Assessment – transforming your values, vision, and purpose into a shortlist of strategic priorities
- Strategic Objectives – defining these workable, continuous improvement activities under the four categories of Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and Organisational Capacity.
- KPIs and Targets – defining the right KPIs and targets for your business to chart your progress.
- Projects – defining the necessary projects to a) fix issues and b) stimulate desired change
- Communication – to ensure everyone in your organization receives the timely, engaging, two-way communications that they need to buy into the strategy and actively participate in its success.
- Automated rollout – using a software system such as QuickScore to automate your strategy management, and to eliminate wasted time, errors, and cost from the process.
Useful resources
Start with the following resources
- Course: How to Run a Strategy Workshop
- e-Book: Strategic Planning Workbook
- Presentation: Strategic Planning based on the Balanced Scorecard
… and if you don’t want to run the workshop yourself
Whatever your industry or remit (profit-making or non-profit-making), the Intrafocus Strategic Planning Process can help you achieve strategy success quickly. Our team of strategy consultants is here to help make the process as easy as possible for you – whatever stage you are at in your strategy development. We typically begin with a workshop to get the ball rolling, and this is something that can be delivered on a virtual / distanced basis as required to support social distancing safety guidelines. Please contact us to find out more.
