A Strategic Plan is About Communication
A Strategic Plan is about communicating financial and operational objectives by taking numbers and converting them to words.
The reason for Strategic Planning is to implement a plan of action that will make the business’s Vision/Strategic Plan a reality. Strategic Planning is the actual process of implementing a Strategic Plan that has set obtainable and measurable financial and operational objectives.
A Strategic Plan needs to come out of the Owner’s office, the Board Room and Executive Staff meetings and be communicated to every employee at all levels of the business. It is the responsibility of Owners and Executives to communicate the future direction of the business, in a positive way, to both internal and external parties.
When developing a Strategic Plan, the future results of the business need to be realistic and project a positive direction and path for the business’s operations and activities to both employees and external parties. The best way to ensure that everyone is moving in the same direction by developing and establishing well defined goals and objectives throughout all operational areas and levels of the business.
All Strategic Plans need to be flexible. Owners and Executives need to remember that internal and external events can make a Strategic Plan impossible to achieve. Even worse is when management refuses to change directions when they discover that the basis of the business’s Strategic Plan is based on faulty assumptions.
Business Owners and Executives need to understand that Strategic Planning is more than being all about profitability. Strategic Planning needs to be about operations, customer service and satisfaction, product quality and management performance just to name a few.
Strategic Planning is about having a measurement system that measures all areas of the business’s performance by easily defined metrics, that everyone can understand what is being measured, how the measurement is being calculated and, most importantly, why the metric is being measured.
There is no way a Strategic Plan will be successful without timely review, revision and corrective action if needed. Implementing measurement systems, such as goals and objectives, throughout the business will improve the business’s communication and align all the operational area’s strategies. Goals and objectives are an important part of a Strategic Planning process and when goals and objectives are implemented correctly, it requires routine meetings at all levels of a business to follow up and review the strategic action items that are being implemented.
Strategic Planning is about communication, setting achievable goals and objectives, monitoring and measuring progress and adapting the Strategic Plan as the business’s environment changes.
Please contact The Siburg Company if your business needs assistance with development and implementing a Strategic Plan.