Besting Your Plan’s Performance: The Time To Start 2012 Strategic Planning is Now
You Should Be Getting Year-Over-Year Performance Increases
If plan governance isn’t instilled as a core element of the executive
team’s reality, focus on accomplishing strategy wains quickly. Why?
Because time flies past rapidly and organizations face so many daily
distractions that the interference begins to blur the big picture for
all but the most focused executives. Ideally, strategic plans should be
refreshed quarterly, updated annually and rewritten every three years.
It should be an ongoing part of business operations to re-check against
plan goals and objectives.
Corporate plan management is a day-to-day and week-by-week activity. The long-held belief that strategic plans are addressed once a year serves to obfuscate the ever-green nature of what plans really represent. They require a switch in our mindset away from treating strategic planning as if it were a project. Instead, it is an ongoing journey that requires us to recheck our position against the map frequently to avoid getting lost.
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.
Mapping Out Strategy Execution: Part 2 of “Why We Fail at Strategy Implementation“
In the first segment of this article, we explored some common causes of plan execution failure. The issues addressed in that article are all avoidable if execution is planned and managed properly. Much of the success or failure of strategy implementation is determined during the planning process. The issues not dealt with during the planning process can be systematically handled during tactical execution. This article delves into a six step road map for strategy execution and provides techniques to mitigate problems in execution and avoid common implementation issues with our strategic plans.
