Fundamentals of Strategic Planning

The need for strategic planning

• Benefits of strategic planning
• Defining the strategic planning process

Defining components of a strategic plan

• The "who" and "what" of a strategic plan
• Communicating and implementing the strategy

Addressing your organization's mission and vision

• Identifying your organization's core competencies
• Differentiating your products and services in the marketplace

Detecting Opportunities and Threats

Operating in micro and macro environments

• Analyzing how competitive and other environmental factors shape strategy
• Determining the impact of operating and remote environments

Assessing external forces

• Analyzing your operating and external environment
• Initiating a SWOT analysis

Recognizing Strengths and Weaknesses

Applying a resource-based view analysis

• Mapping your internal value chain
• Identifying competitive differentiators
• Evaluating culture, human resources, skills, processes and structure

Auditing internal capabilities

• Highlighting the key activities in the value chain
• Identifying strengths by business function
• Recognizing vulnerabilities
• Expanding the SWOT analysis

Identifying Strategic Options

Evaluating factors for choosing strategy

• Mapping strategies to product or market life cycle
• Aligning strategies with capabilities of the organization
• Choosing strategies to meet stakeholder expectations

Selecting appropriate strategic models

• Identifying sources of competitive advantage
• Implications of mergers and acquisitions
• Leveraging the power of growth strategies
• Global strategies for sourcing, operations and marketing

Formulating Your Strategic Plan

Assessing the feasibility of alternatives

• Analyzing and evaluating the options
• Ensuring stakeholder participation and buy-in

Conducting gap analysis

• Assessing organization characteristics relevant to strategy execution
• Determining gaps between current and needed characteristics
• Closing the gaps through targeted practice

Linking strategy to actions

• Operationalizing the strategic plan
• Designing the operating unit plan
• Establishing appropriate objectives and milestones
• Managing culture, human resources, skills, processes and structure for strategy execution
• Initiating programs and projects for implementing strategy

Executing Your Strategy for Success

Establishing effective communication mechanisms

• Aligning culture to strategic direction
• Linking rewards to performance

Maximizing results with applied processes

• Connecting people and their skills to the execution of strategy
• Establishing and maintaining communications
• Designing effective information systems
• Organizing to execute in line with strategy

Monitoring and Controlling Implementation

Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Setting up metrics to measure performance
• Monitoring progress with dashboards
• Dashboards for visual presentation of KPIs to help decision makers take action
• Deploying Balanced Scorecards

Dimensions of strategic control

• Detecting changes in assumptions
• Coping with a dynamic environment
• Adjusting for unanticipated events