Strategic Plans That Lead To Action

A strategic plan should deliver more than just a document that sits on a desk collecting dust – it should deliver a strategy that drives real action and real change. It’s about bringing stakeholders – management, staff, vendors and customers – together in more efficient and effective ways. It’s about delivering better, more innovative tools and technologies that better serve stakeholders. Strategic planning is about much more than a planning document – it’s about strategic change and action.

realchange-framework

 

At Darby Consulting, we use our RealChange methodology for strategic planning and execution. It serves as a framework to help organizations create strategic plans that lead to action. Below is an image of our RealChange framework.

The five steps of strategic planning, shown in the framework above, usually take eight weeks to 12 months to be carried out. The timing depends on the complexity of the organization and the number of stakeholders to be involved. Below is a brief summary of the five steps:

  1. External Assessment – focuses on gathering information on outside factors that impact the organization. This step includes identifying relevant trends, improvement opportunities and potential threats that will shape the organization’s ability in fulfilling its mission.
  2. Internal Assessment – focuses on gathering information about the internal processes and capabilities that enable the organization to provide products/services to its customers. Strategic plans are more likely to be implemented successfully when the internal organization is well-positioned to support it.
  3. SWOT Analysis – data gathered during the previous two steps will be used as input into the SWOT analysis. The SWOT is a simple and practical framework for analyzing an organization’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats it faces. It will help the organization focus on its strengths, minimize threats, and take the greatest possible advantage of opportunities available. The SWOT will also be used as the basis for the next step, Strategy Development.
  4. Strategy Development – focuses on clarifying and building consensus on the purpose of the organization, where the organization wants to be in the future and how it is going to get there. The key outputs from this step are the organization’s mission, vision, values, strategic issues, parameters, goals & objectives and organization-wide strategies.
  5. Action Planning – is the last step of the strategic planning process and is an important link to strategy execution. This last step is critical to ensuring the organization’s newly developed strategy is implemented and measured. Innovation workshops can provide the necessary platform for new, divergent thinking on how the organization can implement organization-wide strategies that were identified during the previous step.

The five playbooks of strategy execution are used in following months and years to execute the newly developed strategy. Our strategy execution is centered on change management best practices that are integral to executing strategy and transformational changes. The playbooks are:

  1. Visible Sponsorship – focuses on identifying and preparing highly influential stakeholders to take an active role in visibly (and effectively) sponsoring the strategy at various levels of the organization.
  2. Proactive Communication – aligns the strategy with the project phases and key milestones to ensure that the right messages are delivered to the right people at the right time using the most appropriate method.
  3. Distributed Learning – utilizes on-demand, distributed learning strategies to ensure that all stakeholders impacted by change have anytime, anywhere access to the requisite knowledge and information they will need in order to adapt and perform in their new environment.
  4. Supportive Culture – defines the cultural implications of the strategy and provides solutions to align the organization’s needs with the future-state design.
  5. Meaningful Measurement – provides processes and tools to measure and track the strategy change progress.

It is important to remember that strategy execution is fluid – plans can be and are often modified to fit new and changing environments, but it’s important to keep focus and not loss momentum. Organizations spend a tremendous amount of time creating and fine-tuning strategic plans so it’s critical that they include well-laid action plans to ensure real change occurs.

To Learn More

You can visit Darby Consulting’s website and blog to view previous articles. Our blog address: http://darbyconsulting.com/blog/

About Darby Consulting

Darby Consulting is a leading North American strategy, project, and change management consulting firm. We serve organizations across multiple industries and provide experienced consultants who can quickly and efficiently deploy processes, tools, templates and technologies to meet any strategy or project challenge.

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