10 Operational Planning Steps That 85% of Corporations Wish They Knew
Considering that 85% of corporate strategic plans fail to deliver on
their intended results (according to KPMG), it’s no wonder that
operational planning has come to the forefront of the minds of CEOs
across the globe. Data suggests that most organizations would certainly
benefit from
adopting a more formalized approach to strategic planning and that many
companies have routinely failed to successfully and fully implement
their strategic goals due to poor operational planning. What can be done to correct the problem?
The 2011 Strategic Planning Checklist: Evaluate Your Strategic Planning Process and Strategy Effectiveness
One of our most popular articles last year dealt with a simple checklist for evaluating strategic planning process effectiveness. Having ushered in the new year and a fresh decade, we decided it would be a worthwhile exercise to revisit the list and analysis done last year and submit an updated, more fitting set of evaluation criteria for 2011. There are new criteria added in this year’s evaluation, and many that have carried over from last year but have enhanced analysis.
To get into the spirit of introspection, let’s start with the following questions:
Have you given much consideration to the possibility that your strategic and operational plans may be far less effective than they could be? - How would you begin to measure the effectiveness of your current strategic planning process?
- Is the process effective and repeatable in consistently defining meaningful goals that get achieved as expected when the plan is followed?
Strategy and the planning associated with creating and implementing it is all about the results, but how do you evaluate your process for strategic planning and know if it is on track or as optimized as it might be? This article should help you to objectively evaluate your planning process and identify potential issues and risks that may exist in your organization's current planning world. As you read this article, answer along as we ask the questions to help you honestly evaluate your current business planning process.
Prioritizing Organizational Wants Versus Needs - How To Tell The Difference
...and make the right decisions
In strategic planning, we must learn to separate wants from actual needs. We are forced to make tough decisions that open one door and close another. Weighty strategic decisions can be made easier if we apply a decision “triage” to help structure the cognitive process we must complete. But how do we separate requirements from “desirements” in the business world fairly and consistently? Sometimes budgetary constraints drive us to adopt a strategy of eliminating options that are not actually requirements for our business, at least not at this time. For that first round of elimination, we need a litmus test of sorts. More to the point, what we need is a decision process to help us filter the wants from the needs. This article provides a system for making such an evaluation within our strategic planning process.
