Strategic planning is a buzz word that is thrown around a
lot, but unless you know how to develop and implement a strategic plan, the
term is useless. It’s important to understand that strategic plans will differ
greatly among practices and therefore, a “cookie cutter” approach will not be
beneficial. In this post, I would like to offer a few tips to driving
successful strategic planning and implementation.
1.
Involve
your entire staff.
It is important that everyone in the practice be included in
the process in some way. By collecting the insight of the people on the front
lines, the plan will likely be more accurate, practical, and actionable. Also,
by being inclusive, everyone will feel that they are an important part of a
team and they will be more inclined to drive the implementation.
2.
Conduct
a situation analysis.
Begin by looking at internal and external factors.
Internally, explore your operations, human resources, and finances - budget,
profits, revenues, and debt. Externally, look at your competitors, market
condition, and the economy. Lastly, conduct a thorough SWOT analysis –
strengths, weaknesses (internally), and opportunities and threats (externally).
This assessment will be the basis for your strategic plan. Figure out what you
do well and what needs to be improved to build your practice and create a
sustainable competitive advantage.
3.
Develop
business objectives.
These goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, actionable,
realistic, and time-driven. Potential
goals can be focused on sales, profits, growth, or image and positioning.
4.
Develop
an overall strategy.
Your strategy should support your objectives. These will
drive your tactics and determine how you will execute. During this phase, you
should examine the variables that may affect your strategy and determine if
they are controllable or uncontrollable. Typically, the internal variables will
be controllable and the external variables will be uncontrollable.
5.
Create
control measures.
Lastly, you will create key control measures that will
measure the success of the initiative. It may help to think of this step in
terms of who does what… when… and how. Implementing control measures will help
keep strategic planning a process instead of simply a document.
The key with strategic planning is developing specific goals
with a specific implementation plan, while also being flexible enough to change
within the changing environment of business.
