3 steps to successful strategic planning
Have you joined a young organization that has an opportunity to define a cohesive organizational strategy? Or does your organization feel fractured, and you are in a position to bring it into a shared path forward?
Recently, my organization’s top management team realized that each department was operating like a game of tug of war with six ends on the rope. Each department felt like it was doing right by the organization and pulling in the right direction. Without shared goals, however, we were just taking turns pulling each other in different directions, which resulted in a lack of planned results. What we needed was a strategic plan.
The process of kickstarting a strategic planning program may feel intimidating, but it is easy to get started with the use of some quality tools, and can help define which way everyone should pull. Follow these three steps.
1. Identify the vision
Before defining any metrics, objectives, goals or strategies, the organization must decide on its vision. To illustrate this using the tug-of-war analogy, the departments should combine their ends of the rope, work as a cohesive team, communicate regularly and pull the organization toward the vision as a team.
At my organization, the first question we asked was, “What is the purpose of a vision statement?” A vision statement defines where the organization would like to be in the future. It should express what the organization would like to accomplish, be inspiring, be brief, appeal to all stakeholders and describe the ideal condition to provide direction.
We pulled the department heads together and asked, “What are things you would like to see in the years to come?” Each idea was written on a sticky note, and the notes were grouped on an affinity diagram. The resulting categories were motivation/culture, operational excellence, vision/future, outreach and customer experience.
Being a small organization intending to grow, we determined the vision would be a sales target by the end of 2025 through building a culture of empowerment, positivity and continuous improvement. With a vision in sight for each department, it was time to carve out the pathways and planned activities needed to reach our goals.
Does that mean top management can disperse the meeting and delegate this task to someone good at planning? Not at all. Top management’s commitment is the key to success. It must ensure each department works as a cohesive team and remains focused on developing organizational goals suitable for long-range planning.
2. Perform a SWOT analysis
So, what’s next? Does everyone know what the organization does well? What is the organization lacking? What elements in our environment can we use to implement strategies and increase profitability? What elements in our environment could endanger the integrity and profitability of the business?
To find these answers, it was time to send in the SWOT team to conduct an analysis and find our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). We conducted a SWOT analysis with top management by asking each member to write down their ideas on sticky notes so we could add them to the grid on the whiteboard. Next, we used colored dots to vote and rank the importance of each idea.
Now what do we do with this information? We started by diving deeper to find the information needed to build on our strengths, eliminate our weaknesses, exploit opportunities and mitigate threats.
3. Define strategic goals
With everyone armed to the teeth with information and our vision defined, we moved forward and defined the organization’s strategic goals. To do so, we used the SMARTWAY acronym, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time frame, worthwhile, assigned and yield. Using this framework helped us ensure the goals were defined adequately and supported our vision.
We chose four major areas from the SWOT analysis and, because each goal supports the organization’s long-range plan, we needed to break them down into more manageable chunks called multi-year objectives. Similarly, each multi-year objective was refined into multiple strategic tasks, such as planned activities, policies, projects and programs, to measure progress monthly or quarterly.
In other words, multiple tasks support each multi-year objective, various multiyear objectives support the strategic goals, and the strategic goals support the organization’s pursuit of its long-range vision.
The only thing left to decide was a plan for cascading these strategic goals, multiyear objectives and strategic tasks to the appropriate teams, composing action plans, and determining how frequently to review progress, roadblocks, additional initiatives and changes to the plan.
Key to success
For the strategic planning program to be successful, it takes continuous commitment from top management to ensure each department is working as a cohesive team. At the end of 2021, our team had kicked off a strategic planning program successfully, was engaged and working closer together, and met or exceeded multiyear objectives.
Corey Wyatt is Continuous Improvement/Quality Lead at Stance Healthcare Inc.
Reprinted with permission from Quality Progress© 2023ASQ, www.asq.org. All rights reserved. No further distribution allowed without permission. Read more content from ASQ here.
