Strategic Planning Part 2: Determine Your Strategy

You have your Vision, your team is engaged, but how do you determine the appropriate focus for the next few years?  More importantly, how do you start down a path that leads to building out that Vision? Most companies and organizations understand the business value of producing a Strategic Plan, and that is the core deliverable of your strategy. They do this annually, as a part of a formal function, and produce a document outlining their plans for the next 3-5 years. However, many lose sight of the fact that the emphasis on the process to create the deliverable is where you differentiate your plans. You are seeing in a theme in the recommendations for all of these efforts:

Approach with DATA

Your vision helps with establishing the direction and engaging your company's or organization's leadership. As you embark on the development of your specific strategies, you want to use as much data as possible to truly transform those visions components into plans. Data is the basis for informing the development of the plans that have the biggest impact and highest opportunity for success. Let's look at the type of data that is helpful for this type of effort.

Current Environment 

What are the current business process flows, applications, data records, and user points of interaction? Utilizing your existing operational documentation and data is key to understanding how to lay out a course for the future. It is highly likely that your existing GAPS in supporting your business today will still be there in the future if you do not explicitly understand and address them.

Business Drivers

The vision was developed using a process that ensured appropriate business input. Use that to distill down into specific drivers so that as your operationalize into a plan, you can consider the time and relative impact. External impacts that are occurring soon MUST be understood in more detail than impacts that are forecast for farther in the future. Getting your business stakeholders to distill their business vision forms the basis for this part of the data.

Build Your Strategies

You have a vision. You understand your starting point. And you have a direction the business heading. Now you lay out your plans. Keeping in mind that that the Strategic Planning effort emphasizes the process and also takes different perspectives to ensure it is as real as strategy can be. Focus on gathering information and facts, and documenting as you go.

Example of Building Strategies

Business Goals - A statement of WHAT will be achieved
Business Strategy - The HOW or choice to achieve that goal
Business Critical Success Factor - Capability or condition that must exist for strategy to be successful
Business Value of the CSF - What is the business value of the specific CSF?

After defining the CSFs and Business Requirements, leverage your analysis to begin to describe the gap between the existing  environment and the vision for the functional area. Once you describe the vision and the current environment, the gap between the two should naturally fall out.

The last step is to document any know business value associated with filling the gap between the current state and the vision as well as the investment expected to achieve the business value described. Note that is possible, in fact likely, that your strategy will include investment that is not a part of your vision. There will be critical success factors you need to operationalize before a vision state can be achieved. That is why the process and action of developing is so valuable, you uncover details that were not available to you before!

Developing the Specifics

Keep in mind that this effort is iterative and can take time. Months if you are developing a Strategic Plan for the first time. But once your strategies are developed, maintaining them, even if business direction and vision evolves, is not onerous. Do not shortcut these steps and know you are the right path when it feels like all you are doing is talking about what will be. Most companies and organizations do not spend enough time on this part of the process because the payback is not immediate. However, you can be sure that this time is some of the most valuable your organization or company will spend. That will be more clear when we talk about how to develop your Operational Plan from your Strategy.