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If you want to know where you’re going, you tend to use a map and in the case of a business that map is all about clear strategic objectives. To do this you need to fully understand the current state of your business and to know where you want it to go in future.
Organisations without a strategic plan are more likely to fail, as the enterprise has no clear vision of what success looks like. Additionally, aimlessness can create negativity with employees who need positive direction if they’re to continue to be engaged and help the business grow.
Businesses that take the time to perform strategic planning have a detailed road map to help realise this clear vision. It provides support for decision-making and ensures that employee engagement and productivity are strategically managed as they strive for success. In addition, strategic plans enable organisations to adjust along the way, accounting for errors, new concepts, and changing conditions.
What Are the 6 Key Elements of Strategic Planning?
At Oriri we use a comprehensive breakdown based on the well-established pyramid below:
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Develop a Vision of Your Future
The planning process begins with a vision statement which is a clear declaration of what your business or institution wishes to achieve in the future. As a strategic planning tool, this statement will act as a guide to steer all current and future activities.
State Your Mission
A mission statement sets out the purpose of your organisation within the larger world. It takes in matters concerning your audience, products, services and stance on issues such as sustainability and CSR. For strategic planning, your mission statement should provide a consistent framework that your team can follow when developing initiatives and standard practices.
Outline Your Desired Objectives
Strategic objectives should be clear, attainable, measurable, and achievable. If properly defined, they will set the benchmarks that strategic planners can use to measure the success and impact of your initiatives.
Create Your Strategic Plan
One of the key elements of strategy is the creation of an actionable plan. This plan brings together both organisational vision and execution. An effective plan maps long-term objectives to strategic goals and actionable steps. It should encourage innovative thinking, competitive advantage and an awareness of opportunities and threats.
Develop an Approach for Achieving this Plan
At this stage of strategy development, your organisation needs to lay out a methodology, which your team will use to implement your plan.
Develop Specific Tactics
Once you have your approach in place, your team can now develop focused projects or programmes to match your strategic planning initiatives.
So, How Do You Develop a Strategic Plan?
For effective strategic planning, you’ll need to take into account each of the elements outlined above. Drilling down, there are certain activities that will help enrich and focus the process from this point:
SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. During the early stages of planning, a SWOT analysis enables strategic management teams to make an assessment of the business environment in which an organisation operates. Furthermore, this analysis illustrates how conditions within the business and in the larger competitive environment can present strategic challenges to the organisation’s mission.
Monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Central to developing a strategy is creating plans with initiatives and activities that have predictable time frames and measurable results. Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are measurable quantities which enable businesses to track progress. Examples might include net profit margins, customer turnover, or how many employees the company decides to hire within a given time period. The results of this continuous analysis will enable your team to amend the process as you go.
Strategic Planning Tools
Some of the work of realising a strategic vision can be achieved using planning tools such software and digital platforms that can automate elements of the process, with mapping and planning cycles. However, a strategic planning tool can only do so much. Your organisation may well reap greater advantages by outsourcing strategic management and planning needs and that’s where we come in at Oriri.
Choosing a Strategic Planning Partner
The view from the trenches can be a limited one, making it easy for those responsible for strategic planning to lose sight of the bigger picture as they micro-manage. To gain a full view of an organisation’s strategic management process, senior leadership teams should engage the services of a strategic planning partner. A professional strategic consultancy offers the benefits of specialist expertise to help you craft an actionable and measurable strategic plan, suited to your particular environment.
Here at Oriri, we provide expertise on people, their operations and the environments that surround them. When it comes to strategic planning, our experienced team will guide you through to exactly where you want to be, whether that’s driving organisational change, solving challenges with operational talent or increasing cost-efficiency and overall commercial improvement.
We specialise in creating people-led strategic plans that will improve the culture of your business, its overall engagement and your employer value proposition. Ultimately, we can help you build better business performance.
If you’d like to learn more about how Oriri can assist your organisation with successful strategic planning, get in touch with us.