Every company needs to be goal-oriented! In short, they need a strategic business plan.
It’s hard to accomplish anything without a plan. Whether you’re coaching a football team, cooking Thanksgiving dinner, or running your business, you need a strategic plan.
Strategic management has become crucial in the world of business and the fast-changing world in which we live and work.
Every successful company has a plan and knows where it is going in the future. Taking the time to review the company’s past performance and predict its future performance provides a roadmap to follow. But if you stick it in a drawer and let dust accumulate, it won’t serve as the foundation of your business, as it should.
Developing your strategic business plan takes a multi-step process that encompasses your:
- Vision
- Values
- Mission
- Strategic initiatives
- Goals
- Specific action steps
A properly designed and facilitated planning process will efficiently guide your team from organizational goals to specific objectives and actions for every member. That leads to better performance in all areas and stronger team culture.
The strategic planning process steps are outlined below.
Determine your strategic position
This preparation phase sets the stage for all work going forward. You need to know where you are to determine where you need to go and how you will get there. To get started, follow these steps:
- Get right stakeholders involved from the start
- Consider both internal and external sources
- Identify key strategic issues by talking with executives
- Pull in customer insights
- Collect industry and market data
With all these, you can get a clear picture of your company’s position in the market and in the minds of your customers.
Identify what’s important
Focus on where you want to take your organization over time. This sets the direction of the enterprise over the long term and clearly defines the mission (markets, customers, products, etc.) and vision (conceptualization of what your organization’s future should or could be).
From this analysis, you can determine the priority issues. These issues are significant to the overall well-being of the enterprise. So, they require the full and immediate attention of the entire management team.
The strategic business plan should focus on these issues.
Prioritize your objectives
Once you have identified your current position in the market, it is time to determine objectives that will help you achieve your goals. Your objectives should be in line with your company’s mission and vision.
Objectives ought to be distinguishable and quantifiable to help achieve the strategic long-term goals and initiatives identified in step one.
There comes SMART – Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timeliness.
SMART goals are useful in setting a timeline and identifying the capital and resources that should be achieved, and also key performance indicators for measuring success. So that everyone in the organization could incline to work harder for making goals true.
Formulate a strategy
This phase involves identifying the strategies required to accomplish the goals and mapping out a schedule and effective communication of responsibilities.
Strategy mapping is an excellent tool for making to visualize the entire plan. Furthermore, operating from the top-down structural maps makes it possible to see market operations and to find progress opportunities.
Since the market and economic conditions are dynamic, the creation of alternative solutions to address each phase of the strategy is crucial at this point.
Execute and manage the plan
With well-conceived action plans clearly stated and owned by your management team, implementation can occur. This is where you and your team make it happen.
Set up regular reviews with individual contributors and their superiors and determine check-in points to make sure you’re on track. There must be activity schedules, accountabilities, tracking, and evaluation to make sure your strategic business plan does not just gather dust on office shelves.
Review and revise the plan
Reviewing your progress and measuring the results enable you and your team to see the progress you are making. This management information can be used to keep people and activities on track, identify necessary changes and continuously improve the process and your company.
The strategic business plan and priorities will be checked and revised once a year to incorporate new business adjustments, and ensure targets are based on the organization’s constantly changing environment.
Master the strategic planning process steps
As you continue to implement the strategic business plan process, repeating each step regularly, you will start to make measurable progress toward achieving your company’s vision.
Instead of always putting out fires, reacting to the competition, or focusing on the latest hot-button initiative, you’ll be able to maintain a long-term perspective and make decisions that will keep you on the path to success for years to come.
