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Strategic Planning

All to often a strategic initiative is initiated from a personal whim without proper research, planning and reflection. Then once a strategy has been engaged rarely is it properly monitored and measured then adapted at the business and environment change. Here we will look at some of the key attributes of a strategy and how these can be effectively derived from businesses data sets. Strategic planning does not stop there as monitoring, tracking, changing and reporting against a strategy or set of strategies in relation to each other is just as important and should be researched just as thoroughly.

Within in a strategy there a number of key attributes:

  • Vision
  • Mission
  • Rules/Values

Each of these top-level attributes must be properly positioned inline with the business for any strategy to be viable. All to often only the vision or maybe mission is developed (i.e. the CIO says "we need to dominate the online market for widget x" a great vision but is it achievable? what are the defining goals or mission? how do we measure success? etc. Many business leaders especially CIO's may argue that the time to define and develop a critical business strategy is too resource heavy, making it more important to have a driving strategy (without basis) at an early stage then adapt as time and information become more prevalent. Now looking at how many programmes fail or initiatives fall by the way side it's easy to see that this is a false economy, developing sloppy economic drivers and poor efficiency within in a business.

To be able to create an effective strategy there are certain processes, which must be followed to derive and set out information that can define the business, the strategy and the market.

Strategic Planning Process

Looking around there are many processes available for strategic planning, some start with a vision and work there way down to find the best fit or give a probability for a strategies success. Others define the business, the market and a number of potential strategies around a specific area or topic allowing you to choose the most suitable ones at the time for you business and keep the others in mind for the future. All types are valuable in different situations and should be understood. As we mentioned above, many strategies come from a single outlandish statement "market domination" or "new innovative product" these are fine as a starting statement and will help define information that is needed to better understand the implications of the given strategy, but an initial stage they should be flexible and WILL change over numerous iterations. Taking the idea of market dominance we will almost definitely narrow the market to a sector or geographical location (unless you are Microsoft or CISCO). So we may have market dominance in the UK, then market dominance in UK local government. Already this is sounding more achievable and measurable. Added to this the ideas of timeframes, costs and dependencies and we may have a vision that will tie closely to the mission, rules, business capability and the businesses current strategic goals. For example "In the next 5 years we will dominate the UK local government for low cost office furniture" tied in with a mission, rules and business map then all the underlying information sets.

This is not to say that a strategy should be toned down, quite often the reverse is true and a strategy is too narrow or will not deliver real value to the businesses bottom line, again this needs to be defined, then many programs which turn out to be loss leaders or money pits would never be started in the first place.

Defining this information should be a standard process used for every and any strategy allowing for fair comparison and measurement. Breaking down the mission into a number of inter-related attributes helps better understand the affects of a strategy, these may include.

Mission

  • Goals
  • Objectives
  • Critical Success Factors
  • Risks
  • (Sub) Strategies
  • Plans
  • Demands (resource, costs, time, skills, knowledge)

Next you need to look at the following business attributes in isolation and in relation to the above factors, these include:

Business

  • Capability
  • Skills
  • Lights on activities
  • Demands
  • Focus
  • History
  • Culture
    • Portfolio
      • Issues
      • Benefits
      • Risks
      • Plans
      • Strategies
      • Programmes
      • Projects

Strategic Planning Tools

With all this information to acquire, assess and report its no wonder that many strategic initiatives never get past the vision stage. Fortunately with any set of processes or methodologies there normally comes tools and systems, which make the job much easier. Any large organisation will have much of this information stored and reported in previous audits or financial assessments, ongoing programs or projects will have risks, resource plans, costs etc, but even with this readily available information it can be difficult to align and measure all the correct data. This problem spurned a new set of tools designed to aid decision makers or strategic planners, these included Business Intelligence, Portfolio Management, Corporate Performance Management and Business Performance Management. Tools like these all run on a similar theme of taking business, financial and project information and presenting it in a unified and interactive format.

All these tools have specific purposes out side of strategic planning, but their very nature is ideal for many areas of the strategic planning process. Pure strategic planning tools can add a lot of value if they incorporate business intelligence or even as standalone process models which guide you step by step through the assessment process but as with many of these systems there is one persistent point which hinders true strategic planning/mangement; the historic nature of the information. This brings us to the most important and most often missed aspect of a strategy - the tacking and long-term development (strategic management). Although with more and more information we can make better and more accurate predictions for the future it is almost certain that you will never get it right first time, so strategic planning if done as just a prerequisite to the next business year or a new strategy in itself will never deliver its maximum potential if not considered to be flexible and evolutionary.

Having a snapshot of 6 month old or even a few weeks old information is useful but will not be ideal for decisions made on the current state of the business and moving forward it will get more and more dated especially taking into account the affects of any new strategies. So what is the logical solution to this situation, we know it is impossibly time consuming to record all the above information on a day to day basis from an operational level - this is to say it is impossible using existing methods of planning and management. If you look again at much of this information you can see that the real value exists in what is actually happening to people, projects, systems and budgets etc.

With timesheet systems, expense and billing systems, scheduling and resource/skills matrix as well as financial and planning systems, which are used day-to-day, it becomes apparent that data at suitable business levels may exist within an organisation. Being able to track budgets vs. actuals, resource capability vs. resource demand and supply, milestones and timesheets the historic and real-time aspects of a business begin to add real value.

Looking at this as a set of requirements for a strategic management system (i.e. end to end / strategic planning to delivery) we find;

  • The system should not force input of low-level business information such as continuous task based planning
  • The system should pull in information from or be the repository for key business datasets such as time recording, budgets, project plans, resource/skills matrix, risks etc
  • Data should be rolled through business levels such as team, project, division, program, and enterprise
  • The ability to drill down into information for addition, editing or reporting
  • All information should follow consistent processes for recording and auditing
  • Definable and measureable goals/KPI's/benifits

These are not definitive but should be the basis for a system that aids management do their job day to day at a strategic level. With this level of control and understanding it becomes far less risky and far more beneficial to undertake new strategic initiatives. It should also be noted that this style of tool will never replace the detailed and more historic data based systems as they give true audit trails and granular analysis but this data is not as valuable for the day to day management as a higher level real time solution.

Now that you are more aware of what is required from a strategic planning and management solution look at methodologies which would suit your companies culture for developing an initial strategic plan then speak to Atlantic Global about managing your strategies day to day based on real time data.