If an organisation wants to apply for funding for developing facilities, for example, it is usually required to produce a strategic plan for a 5 year period. The organisation may be given no option in regard to that criteria.
Operational plans, on the other hand, have a timeframe of one year. When a strategic plan and operational plan have been developed together the operational plan will be constructed for the first year of the strategic plan. This step requires determining the tactics necessary to attain your objectives and designating a timeline and clear communication of responsibilities. Strategy mapping is an effective tool to visualize your entire plan. Working from the top-down, strategy maps make it simple to view business processes and identify gaps for improvement.
Truly strategic choices usually involve a trade-off in opportunity cost. For example, your company may decide to not put as much funding behind customer support, so that it can put more funding into creating an intuitive user experience. First, communicate the plan to the organization by sharing relevant documentation. Then, the actual work begins. Turn your broader strategy into a concrete plan by mapping your processes.
Use KPI dashboards to clearly communicate team responsibilities. The final stage of the plan—to review and revise—gives you an opportunity to reevaluate your priorities and course-correct based on past successes or failures. On a quarterly basis, determine which KPIs your team has met and how you can continue to meet them, adapting your plan as necessary.
Track your progress using balanced scorecards to provide a comprehensive understanding of your business's performance and execute strategic goals. Over time you may find that your mission and vision need to change — an annual evaluation is a good time to consider those changes, prepare a new plan, and implement again. Achieve your goals and monitor your progress with balanced scorecards.
Use a strategy map to turn your organization's mission and vision into actionable objectives. The topics vary and include business planning, accessing capital, marketing, and more.
The organization has nearly 1, centers around the country where businesses can receive consulting or training at a low cost. Find your closest SBDC. You also may be able to find a consultant by talking with your friends and colleagues. They may have worked with a consultant or a firm and can provide you first-hand experience. Consider reaching out to people you know personally and professionally.
You can do a search for consultants in your area or even use professional sites, such as LinkedIn. To help with your search, try finding people with business planning or business strategy experience. If your business has the resources, you may want to consider hiring a strategic planning consulting firm. There are many benefits to hiring a strategic planning consultant. And most of the options above are either free or low cost for small business owners.
Technology also can help you with putting together your strategic plan. Apps and software made specifically for creating a strategic plan help keep you organized—and keep you from overburdening your favorite spreadsheet program. Even after creating your plan, they also make it easier to track progress toward business goals. In Henry Mintzberg published an influential article in Management Science that introduced emergent strategy, a concept he later popularized for the wider nonacademic business audience in his successful book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.
By drawing a distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy, he wanted to encourage managers to watch carefully for changes in their environment and make course corrections in their deliberate strategy accordingly. In addition, he warned against the dangers of sticking to a fixed strategy in the face of substantial changes in the competitive environment. All of this is eminently sensible advice that every manager would be wise to follow.
However, most managers do not. Notice how comforting that interpretation is: No longer is there a need to make angst-ridden decisions about unknowable and uncontrollable things. A little digging into the logic reveals some dangerous flaws in it. If the future is too unpredictable and volatile to make strategic choices, what would lead a manager to believe that it will become significantly less so?
And how would that manager recognize the point when predictability is high enough and volatility is low enough to start making choices? Any company can build a technical sales force or a software development lab or a distribution network and declare it a core competence. Executives can comfortably invest in such capabilities and control the entire experience. Within reason, they can guarantee success. Only those that produce a superior value equation for a particular set of customers can do that.
But customers and context are both unknowable and uncontrollable. Many executives prefer to focus on capabilities that can be built—for certain.
Discussion in management and board meetings tends to focus on how to squeeze more profit out of existing revenue rather than how to generate new revenue. The principal metrics concern finance and capabilities; those that deal with customer satisfaction or market share especially changes in the latter take the backseat. Probably: You have a large corporate strategic planning group. Probably Not: If you have a corporate strategy group, it is tiny.
Probably: In addition to profit, your most important performance metrics are cost- and capabilities-based. Probably Not: In addition to profit, your most important performance metrics are customer satisfaction and market share.
Probably: Strategy is presented to the board by your strategic planning staff. Probably Not: Strategy is presented to the board primarily by line executives. Probably: Board members insist on proof that the strategy will succeed before approving it. Probably Not: Board members ask for a thorough description of the risks involved in a strategy before approving it.
How can a company escape those traps? This involves ensuring that the strategy-making process conforms to three basic rules. Focus your energy on the key choices that influence revenue decision makers—that is, customers. Two choices determine success: the where-to-play decision which specific customers to target and the how-to-win decision how to create a compelling value proposition for those customers.
Characterizing the key choices as where to play and how to win keeps the discussion grounded and makes it more likely that managers will engage with the strategic challenges the firm faces rather than retreat to their planning comfort zone. As noted, managers unconsciously feel that strategy should achieve the accuracy and predictive power of cost planning—in other words, it should be nearly perfect.
0コメント