Results From Planning
Planning with the "end in mind" will make for a better plan that actually is implemented. We all are used to the classic SWOT analysis where you consider your company's internal strengths and weaknesses and your external threats and opportunities. We all tend to focus on weaknesses because, let's admit it, they're easy to come up with. Threats are pretty obvious, but many times they come from sources we can do nothing about. Strengths - and let's hope there are lots of them - help you decide what to focus on. If you don't have a strength to support a strategy, maybe it was a very good strategy for some other company.
Some thoughts come to mind: A simple SWOT analysis on a flipchart with a few people gathered around may not be enough. Spending just a couple hours or days a year considering your strategy may be woefully inadequate. Polling the room for opportunities is nice. You may in fact come up with a few good ideas. However, unless those opportunities are tied to actual execution you are wasting your time (Barrow). Everyone is busy. Unless you really commit resources to executing the plan, nothing is likely to happen. Folks, after all, are already busy doing what they are already doing. How can you expect them to do more? Those woefully short days of planning are flawed because they don't include any plan for monitoring performance. Just having the plan is not enough. Implementing is nice, but it can't be implementing in a vacuum. You've got to tie your planning to periodic, repetitve re-visiting of your strategies and the action plans you have put together to carry them out. Those re-visits have to take place with everyone regathered in the room to talk about progress, what changes to make, and what strategies or portions of action plans to drop.
Other ways to consider strategy (Center):
- Spending some time considering how other folks in companies in your industry and in companies you admire - bench marking - can be very useful.
- Considering you company not as an individual entity, but as part of a business ecosytem makes for more comprehensive strategy. Consider customers, yes, but don't forget suppliers, logistics, human resources, information technology, customer service, along with manufacturing and service delivery.
- The more people you have involved in the process, the better. The receptionist knows more that you might think. So do the folks on the loading dock.
- Simple, actionable, dated goals are easier to refer back to. People will forget the particulars, however, unless you make the objectives more relevant to the individuals involved. Tell a story about how your objectives work at your company. Include more narrative or, literally, stand in front of a small group and tell a story and ask for their feedback on implementing the plan based upon the story's description.
- Keep a score card of performance on objectives may be useful. Posting it on the wall works. So does posting it on the wall with a neon sign. They've done it with safety results at steel mills for years (remember the signs "462 days without an injury"?). How can you do it with marketing results, or HR results for that matter, in a similar fashion?
- Mission statements, done properly, will focus your company on providing products or services that match the company's core competencies. Straying from your core competencies may rightfully cause you to re-consider whether such straying really makes sense.
References
Barrows, Ed. Four Fatal Flaws of Strategic Planning. Harvard Business Reveiw. 13 Mar 2009. http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2009/03/four-fatal-flaws-of-strategic.html
Center for Applied Research. Briefing Notes: A Summary of Best Practice Approaches in Strategic Planning Processes. 2005. http://www.cfar.com/Documents/BestPract.pdf