Strategic Planning

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.