Phase I: Situation Assessment

Where are we now?

Understanding the current situation is vital to identifying the approaches needed to drive success.  A full understanding of the current situation includes an analysis of several areas.  The list below shows a sample list of assessment areas and one or two of the key questions to be answered for each.

• Customers – What are their current and future needs? What are their perceptions of our performance?
• Employees – What are their perceptions of our organization and how we can improve?  How can we make them more effective in their roles?
• Industry trends – What have been recent shifts in the industry?  What shifts are anticipated for the future?
• Competitors – How do we compare against our competitors?  What are their recent and anticipated initiatives?
• Performance trends – How are we performing by product, by market, by channel?
• Recent goals and initiatives – How are we achieving against our plan?  How successful have we been with recent initiatives?
• Organization profile – What are our strengths and areas for improvement with regard to our organization structure, processes, technology, culture, etc.?

Often, planning teams summarize the current situation information into a SWOT: a summary of the organizations key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Phase II: Strategic Workshop

Where do we want to be?

The heart of strategic direction setting is this second step. In our Drivers Model, the information from the situation assessment is combined with the understanding of future trends to develop the vision statement and the mission statement.

• Vision – the organization’s preferred picture of the future

• Mission– the overall purpose of the organization (i.e., what the organization does, for whom it does it, and the benefit)

Click here for a sample segment of the strategic plan for a trade association of meeting planners.  While the mission speaks to “what they do, for whom, and the benefit,” the vision describes what the future will look like if the organization achieves its mission.

The strategic direction setting also includes the defining of goals and objectives. 

• Goals– the broad, long-term aims that define accomplishment of the mission

• Objectives – specific, quantifiable, realistic targets that measure the accomplishment of a goal over a specified period of time.

Each goal has a specific set of objectives, as shown below for the membership goal.

The objectives establish the bar for the rest of the planning effort.  All the strategies, action plans and investments should be focused on achieving one or more of the plan objectives.  Therefore, it is critical that you select the right objectives for measuring our success.  Establishing objectives is perhaps the toughest work in planning.

The planning effort also includes establishing Guiding Principles - general guidelines that set the foundation for how the organization will operate.  Guiding principles are more than just a statement of values.  Guiding principles also describe the actions the organization will take based on the values

How do we plan to get there?

Once the objectives are established, the next step is to develop the road map for achieving the direction.  For the road map to be viable, however, it must focus on three areas in particular. 

• The barriers to achieving the goals and objectives indicate those challenges which the organization must overcome to achieve its strategic direction.  Barriers answer the following questions:  “Why haven’t we achieved our goals already?  What is standing in our way?” 

• While barriers address the challenges, the critical success factors identify those key conditions that must be met to achieve the goals.  Critical success factors, typically no fewer than two and no more than seven per goal, serve as a guide for determining the strategies to be developed.

• The strategies that are undertaken (i.e., the road map) must drive achievement of the strategic direction by controlling the critical success factors and overcoming the barriers.

An important activity at this stage is the prioritization of strategies to determine the items to focus on first.  For each priority strategy, an action plan is developed which details steps, responsibilities, costs and timetables.  The action plans can then be summarized to identify resource requirements and to develop a resource plan to meet those requirements.

Phase III: Implementation & Monitoring

How will we monitor progress?

Many organizations benefit simply from going through the process of creating a strategy.  At this point, everyone is clear on where we are going and how we plan to get there.

However, the key value to strategy development comes in the implementation of the plan.  Unfortunately, all too often, strategic plans become space fillers on an executive’s bookshelf.  To prevent this occurrence, we recommend the following:

• For each priority strategy, an action plan should be developed which details steps, responsibilities, costs and timetables.

• Sample Action Plan

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