Developing a New Strategic Planning Process

While a vision is an overarching, aspirational goal, the strategic plan is the game plan on how to reach it. There are attainable objectives that must be communicated with the organization, so everyone knows the goals, their role, their purpose, and how their contributions are helping the business get closer to achieving the vision.

The purpose of the strategic planning process is to map those activities that will achieve the strategic plan. It typically includes at least four phases that should be repeated regularly:

1. Assessing where the business is and where it needs to go in relation to the vision.
2. Developing a strategy of how the business can achieve high-level goals and how success will be measured.
3. Prioritizing work and delivering outcomes aligned to the strategy at organizational and team levels.
4. Evaluating key performance metrics to understand whether the established goals and related work achieved their intended results and managing operations and change as needed.

The strategic planning process should encompass executives and employees alike, understanding that it takes the entire organization working together to identify risks and opportunities, establish goals, and execute the work that drives the business forward. While the strategic planning process involves all levels of the enterprise, the strategic plan must come from the top down with the trust that the organization is capable of determining how best to execute the plan.

The more common bottom-up approach is often why so many companies fail to execute on strategy. When departments vie for budget to fund projects that are loosely represented as “strategic” based on misaligned understanding of objectives, too many low-value projects get green-lighted. Those projects consume resources that could be spent on higher-value work that has a greater opportunity to reach the goals that achieve the corporate vision.

The purpose of the strategic planning process is to create a vision to drive change and transformation. The strategic plan itself connects that vision to strategic initiatives, priorities, and goals. If there is a disconnect, then there will be insufficient direction, funding, and resources for successful execution. Organizations that struggle to achieve their goals typically have a disconnected and dysfunctional strategic planning process.

The strategic planning process doesn’t require a crystal ball to predict the future with certainty. Instead, it is intended to identify and prioritize potential opportunities and increase the odds of success as measured against the defined objectives. It provides a platform to toss around ideas and determine which are worth trying. It balances out-of-the-box thinking and innovation with the realities of capacity and funding.

The planning process doesn’t stop there. It transforms ideas into a corporate vision with goals and then builds a roadmap on how to get there. The strategic plan gives everyone from the C-suite and stakeholders to every employee a line of sight to align their daily work. Having a sense of purpose ranks as a top contributor to job satisfaction. It is critical to establish a vision but even more valuable to translate that vision into an actionable plan everyone can understand and to which they can be held accountable.

Beyond building a cohesive team rowing in the same direction, the strategic planning process provides the opportunity to optimize resources, processes, and technology to ensure teams are focused on the right things at the right time.

By doing so, companies can save costs and mitigate risks by prioritizing outcomes with the most value.

The evaluation phase of the planning process is effective in identifying what worked and what didn’t for continual improvement and better utilization of resources. In this sense, the strategic plan should always be viewed as evolving, resilient, and agile to the changing forces around it.

Whether your organization lacks a strategic planning process, or you recognize yours has shortcomings, there’s never been a better time to address it. To avoid the common pitfalls of a poorly organized planning process, you must build a new strategic planning process from the top-down. In the most basic sense, you will:

• Designate a cross-functional strategic planning team to identify what the organization needs to do to stay competitive and, potentially, disrupt and dominate your market
• Break down these visionary ideas into actionable plans with clear responsibilities and defined funding and work and resource requirements
• Build a strategic roadmap that aligns every project with strategic goals, identifies strategic priorities, and charts timelines and milestones

For agile execution of the strategic plan, allow goals to drive ideas. Empower teams to decide how they want to deliver. Adopt an iterative approach to encourage testing new concepts, failing fast, and accelerating delivery of successful innovative alternatives.

When strategic planning is an iterative process, the feedback loop of analysis and change refines your strategy, making it more likely that your organization will realize its vision. Like navigating a ship through uncharted waters, constant small course corrections are more likely to get you where you want to go than steering straight ahead until you run aground.

To reach your destination with reduced risk, execute work incrementally, evaluate progress toward goals frequently, and pivot toward adjusted strategies quickly. Funding incrementally instead of all at once ensures that each iteration receives the financial resources it requires.

Strategic planning is an exercise in uncertainty. The question of how to deliver value can be answered in countless ways.

Embrace the uncertainty by building flexibility into planning and execution. The result will be an adaptable plan with goals that can be reprioritized and strategy tradeoffs that weigh funding, capacity and risk.

With the understanding of the basics, it’s time to dig into more of the details of strategic planning. Use the strategic planning process to create your strategic plan and translate it into an actionable roadmap that your entire organization can manage, track, and execute against.

The following guide is still a 1,000-foot view of the strategic planning process, but it provides a simplified approach with clear action items to help get you started.

1. Determine your current market position.

• Designate a process owner and cross-functional planning team to get different perspectives
• Identify strategic issues across the organization and see if there are trends or patterns
• Do a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to identify areas for improvement, growth, and success, particularly in the context of competitors and external factors
• Reach out to customers, vendors and partners to understand their experience, wants, needs, and demands
• Assess your workforce skills, deficits, gaps, and overlaps to determine if resources are optimized and if new skills are required to execute goals
• Evaluate technology preparedness for digital transformation and determine whether additional technology is needed to support work requirements

2. Develop your strategic direction.

• Articulate your mission, vision, and values, and communicate it to all stakeholders
• Define your current competitive advantage and differentiators and determine if there are additional opportunities
• Envision cross-functional strategies for achieving your vision
• Identify strategic, attainable objectives for the short and long term
• Forecast your financial position as a result of achieving these objectives

3. Create an actionable strategic plan.

• Define strategic initiatives and priorities across the organization based on SWOT analysis
• Define SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) for the short-, mid-, and long-term
• Determine key performance indicators (KPIs) for each goal to track progress
• Assign top-down responsibility to cascade down to cross-functional teams and individuals
• Allocate required funding to strategic projects

4. Build a strategic roadmap to align execution.

• Connect strategy to vision, investments, and outcomes
• Manage initiatives/projects, goals, funding, resources, timelines, milestones, teams, KPIs
• Monitor progress, evaluate performance, revise/update goals, and create iterations
• Use cross-functional strategy meetings to identify accomplishments, shortfalls, and next action plans
• Understand impacts of decisions, model trade-offs, and adjust dynamically
• Communicate regularly to the organization’s current strategic priorities, progress, and changes, with data-backed justifications for decisions

5. Review and update strategy.

• Leverage visibility and transparency to assess actual progress towards goals
• Update plan of action with each iteration of strategic initiatives
• Optimize funding and resource allocation in sync with agile execution
• Review quarterly and as strategic direction shifts
• Repeat the entire process at least once every three years or as external forces come into play

Business leaders have reasons for optimism. The status quo doesn’t have to be the guiding principle.

Instead, companies can embrace true strategic planning to redefine how the organization approaches its vision and executes the strategy. There are multiple, interdependent factors driving success in the strategic planning process. A dynamic plan includes these fundamentals:

• Strategy that is driven by products, applications, and services
• Incremental, measurable, and achievable strategic goals
• Allocation of resources (people, capital, and/or material goods)
• Trade-offs in resource allocation modeled for various scenarios
• Strategic funding and initiatives managed to drive performance
• Strategic roadmaps that connect strategy to outcomes with investments, timelines, milestones, priorities, and progress
• Iterative projects with defined, measurable objectives
• Performance and progress shared with dashboards and visualizations
• Short- and long-term assessment of value delivered
• Continuous process for reprioritizing projects and reallocating resources
• Alternatives for achieving objectives based on cost, benefit, risk, and capacity
• Programs delivered to drive innovation and transformational change

Bringing a strategic vision to life takes unprecedented coordination of work, resources and technology. That means engaging people at all levels of the organization and continually evolving their capabilities to execute and deliver on plan.

Unfortunately, too many organizations trip over the hurdle of communicating their vision and execution strategy to employees. Harvard Business Review reported that 95 percent of employees either don’t know or don’t understand their company’s strategy. How can organizations articulate their vision and strategy in a way that makes sense to everyone outside of the planning team?

Even when communication is effective, it doesn’t always mean the message is received for the long term. It’s human nature for people to drift back to working on what they know instead of the unfamiliar work that is aligned with strategy.

It’s also common for individuals to resist working on cross-functional teams. Consistent communication and clarification are often required to keep people engaged and on track.

When it comes to relying on other groups to complete projects, 84% of managers trust colleagues in their own business units but only 9% trust colleagues in other units.

Strategic execution unravels when managers prioritize work for their department above commitments to deliver outcomes for strategic cross-organizational programs.

When teams lose sight of strategic goals and deprioritize these projects, the allocated resources tend to be absorbed by other programs. In fact, it’s not uncommon to reallocate strategic funding to non-strategic work – a practice that undermines strategic execution.

Project teams stay focused and on task if they have confidence in the strategic planning process and are committed to the strategic vision. That means engaging every business unit, department, and team in planning.

In a top-down process, each team buys in on the value statements that clearly define what is expected of them in the short- and long-term. Each iteration provides feedback that refines the team’s understanding of how to achieve its goals.

The strategic roadmap clarifies priorities and resolves conflicts for teams on cross-functional/cross-silo programs. These timelines and milestones establish accountability and set expectations for prioritizing strategic work relative to day-to-day work. An overarching schedule with timelines and milestones for all teams allows everyone to see how their work tracks against the organizational goals.

Collaborative cross-functional teams can make or break a strategic initiative. A shared collaborative workspace allows cross-functional teams to connect and exchange information, ensuring that everyone has what they need to succeed.

Using presentations, office documents, spreadsheets, and email to manage strategic planning and execution is like using an Etch-a-Sketch to create and manage an enterprise-wide customer loyalty program. You need dynamic, interconnected tools to manage interdependent workstreams across the organization.

Strategic planning software streamlines the process by centralizing connected information and automating core functions such as:

• Scenario planning
• Strategic road mapping
• Program management
• Financial planning
• Strategic analysis

Visual tools and dashboards accelerate the process of defining objectives, budget, funding, resources, schedules, and actionable plans.

An automated strategic planning process continuously updates data and forecasts based on input from across the organization, helping to realign priorities, reallocate resources and, when change or disruptions strikes, rethink goals and initiatives. Using strategic planning software not only makes this process more efficient and effective but also provides visibility and transparency across the organization.

Most people find comfort in consistency, so changes to your strategic plan can cause disruption. And no matter how solid the plan is, if it’s not well received early on, you’ll have an uphill battle ahead. That makes communicating the plan to the organization in a comprehensive, authentic way an important part of the strategic planning process. Following are some suggestions for introducing a new strategy.

Ensure executive buy-in

It should be obvious that buy-in from the top is the first step in achieving a collective vision. So, before presenting a new strategy, make sure leadership is fully on board. Next, before tackling the entire organization, begin communicating the plan with a collection of mid-level managers, company thought leaders and influencers that can act as supporters.

Survey your stakeholders

Before presenting the plan to the whole company, talk to a handful of people across multiple departments to gauge their perspectives. Do they perceive a problem with the company’s current strategy? Do they feel the market is changing faster than the company’s efforts to keep up? Do they feel a fresh strategic planning process is warranted?

Prep executives and representatives of the plan

A change in strategic direction is bound to lead to some tough questions. Use the information gleaned during the audit process to anticipate questions and concerns of the attendees. Create clear, comprehensive responses that will help company leaders respond in ways that make the audience feel confident that the plan and its elements have been thoroughly analyzed and reviewed.

Schedule a companywide meeting

For a strategic planning process to be successful, all those tasked with executing the plan must understand the reasons behind it, the challenges associated with it, and the gains anticipated from its execution. Only then can they understand how the activities they participate in will support it.

Use visuals to illustrate your point

Whether you’re talking about the challenges your company is facing, the opportunities you’ve identified or the expected outcomes of your strategic planning process, charts, graphs, and other visualization aids will help the audience to comprehend what you’re presenting faster and easier.

Cite examples of past strategic initiatives

By sharing the details of past strategic planning processes, their outcomes, and their impact on company growth, you can help people to understand the reasons and the value behind these processes and help them to envision the positive outcome you want. A shared vision of success is half the battle.

Address previous failures

If you’ve overhauled your strategy before, your employees will anticipate the same outcome. If it was perceived as a success, you’re in good shape. If previous strategic plans have failed, address your track record upfront. Identify past failures, explain why they failed, and outline how you’ve altered the current approach to ensure better outcomes.

Incorporate a third-party expert

If you anticipate resistance or lack of trust in the new plan, consider bringing in an unbiased outsider that can provide an external perspective and help guide the organization. The right expert can offer fresh perspectives and even drive engagement and excitement.

Introduce the problem before you provide the solution

Many organizations introduce new strategies without sufficiently relaying the reasons why a new approach is essential. Even leaders often can’t explain what problems the strategic planning session is attempting to solve. Ensure the audience understands why the changes are necessary for the continued health of the organization.

Encourage breakout sessions

The material presented at the end of the strategic planning process can be overwhelming. New concepts, major changes and uncertainty can cause the listener to disengage with the speaker, so many will need to hear the information more than once. Schedule breakout sessions among individual teams that reiterate the information in a small-group environment. There, people may be less reluctant to ask questions, so prepare team leaders and managers just like you prepared executives.

Connect team members to the plan

People will be worried about their projects being defunded, their budgets cut, and their jobs lost. Put their minds at ease by using the breakout sessions to connect everyone to the new plan. Explain how the work individuals, teams, and departments will change and how it will map to the new strategy.

Take all the time you need

Make sure the audience understands how the new strategy is going to solve problems and help the organization achieve future growth. Consider illustrating how your organization compares with the competition and their strategies. Ensure every employee can answer the questions: Why are we doing this? What are the problems this strategic plan will solve? How will this position us in the future?

Revisit the plan regularly

Don’t expect flawless execution of your new plan and don’t expect it to remain static. You must continuously revisit and adjust it as necessary. Draw particular focus to issues that, if left unresolved, could derail the plan or its anticipated timeframe.

Even the most inspired vision will come to naught if strategy is not connected to strategic execution. Equally vital is how the strategic plan is communicated throughout the organization to gain sufficient buy-in, funding and resources.

While the strategic plan is approached from the top-down, it is not dictated from above. It envisions the means to an end and empowers the organization to plot the best path.

The most innovative organizations allow the goals to drive ideas. Teams fully engage when empowered from the top down.

For strategic planning to be truly transformative, it takes a sense of urgency to drive organizational change. Clear priorities, achievable goals, rapid iteration, and dynamic re-visioning can accelerate the process in volatile times. A strategic planning process that continuously monitors progress, evaluates outcomes, and forecasts time-to-value allows organizations to pivot in anticipation of changing market conditions.

Creating a strategic planning process is the key to creating a vision that drives organizational transformation. Goals and objectives are both demonstrated and achieved by the strategic plan. Avoiding disconnection between the organizational vision and the strategic plan ensures proper direction, funding, and resources for successful execution.