Buy Strategic Planning And Goal Setting Assignment

Buy Strategic Planning And Goal Setting Assignment

Strategic planning is a disciplined effort. In the end, it produces fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, who it serves, what it does and why. With a focus on the future, effective strategic planning also articulates how an organization will know if it is successful. A successful strategic plan sets priorities, focuses energy and resources, strengthens operations, and ensures that employees and other stakeholders are work- ing toward common goals. Strategic planning answers three key questions: • Where are we? • Where are we going? • How will we get there?

Where are we?

Consider the foundational elements of your mission statement, values and/or guiding principles, and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to assess where your business is — what is happening internally and externally — and determine what changes you need to make.

Where are we going?

The future is impossible to predict, but contemplating scenarios will focus your attention and help you define the future for your business. Specifically, compare your organization to your competitors. What do you do best? What makes you unique? What can your organization potentially do better than any other organization? Answering these questions will help you formulate a picture of what your future make up will be and where you are headed.

How will we get there?

This is the meat of your strategic plan. It’s also the most time consuming. There are a number of routes from your current position to your vision, and picking the right one will determine how quickly or slowly you get to your final destination. Determine your strategy, set short and long term goals, and develop action items to get you there. Iden- tify issues that surround management and monitoring of the action items.

Remember, strategic planning is about growing and improving your company. When you don’t plan, the best you can hope for is maintenance of the status quo. Further down the line, you can expect challenges that will significantly damage or destroy your organization.

The Seven Rules

Buy Strategic Planning And Goal Setting Assignment

In addition to answering the three questions above, effective strategic planning requires following 7 critical rules.

1. Pick the right players. Selecting who should be part of the planning team is an important question. It is essential that planning team mem- bers are people who are committed to the growth of the company, and who can provide valuable input to the process. Unless there is a key employee or manager you want to develop, this is not a time to include every member of your staff. Vet each team member, ensuring each is of the quality and stature (i.e. gets work done and is respected within the company) required to be part of the planning group. Members of the planning team must maintain complete

2. Strategic Planning & Goal Setting

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Buy Strategic Planning And Goal Setting Assignment

confidentiality and be fully engaged in the growth and well being of the company. Employees who are passionate about growing the company, developing an extraordinary organization, and being the CEO’s partner in accomplish- ing will provide positive and constructive input. Accept nothing less.

2. Design planning sessions that yield actual results. Most strategic planning today consists of the following: Once a year, team members check into a nice hotel and lock themselves in the conference room for a few days to “strategize”. They emerge every once and awhile for a round of golf, a team building game, or other such “fun”. This kind of planning is a novel idea, but it just does not work. More often than not, planning in a single session like this yields zero opportunities for critical thinking, and results only in repeating current business practices. Instead, design a planning process that takes place over two to three months, with 3-4 day strategy sessions each month. Extending the process will allow you to research, dialogue, and listen more effectively. From this place a valuable strategic plan is created.

3. Finish what you started. That is, complete the previous year. At the very first session of the planning process, the past goes into the past. To accomplish this, team members should brainstorm information, good and bad, from the previous year – break- downs, breakthroughs, disappointments, accomplishments, and so on. In doing so, employees get to review all the work that got done during the past 12 months, examine the practices and challenges of the previous year, and deter- mine how to move forward. The new year is met with greater enthusiasm when the previous year is properly com- pleted.

4. Big vision, then laser-like focus. Start big by creating a vision of the future of the company. Where do you want to be in the next five years? This is your vision and, when you have one, you are creating a future for the company that employees can believe in and work toward.

Answer the following questions to arrive at your future vision:

In five years… …what will the world look like? …what will be the important trends affecting our industry? …what is our industry dealing with and what does it look like? …what is our image? …what are customers saying about us and why are they loyal to us? …what have we done that no one else has done? …how big is our company? How many employees do we have?

Planning like this allows you to run growth scenarios. Have at least one aggressive, one medium, one sluggish, and one no-growth plan. Get familiar with many possibilities, and then narrow the focus as you get back to present and address what to do immediately and how to implement change.

Buy Strategic Planning And Goal Setting Assignment

S T R AT E G I C P L A N N I N G & G O A L S E T T I N G

5. Be brutally honest. Face the facts that confront your organization. Do not deny or sugar coat the issues that plague growth. Face them honestly and deal with them in an intelligent way. Planning teams effectively face issues by defining the ones that are currently hindering growth. Typically, these critical issues are addressed through the writing of a white paper, a three- to five-page document, written between planning sessions by the members of the planning team, which addresses the problems at hand. The paper should deal directly with the issues and provide the “answer” to the problems. The entire planning team will read the paper prior to the next session and then debate it during the session. Problem solving ensues. Direction is determined.

6. Play nice. The planning team has to be able to actually work and create together. There can be no pretense. Remember, the group has to be able to implement the plan it creates. It is not on a mission to create a plan that sits on a shelf. Rather, through collaboration and problem solving, the group becomes an agent for change. There must be trust within the planning team. People should be able to speak their minds. Nothing should be taken personally, and petty politics and gossip should not be tolerated. A focused environment like this gives the leadership team a great advantage when competing against other business leadership teams.

7. Be disciplined and take continued action. It is important that the leadership team completes its work. To really participate in a good breakthrough planning/ guessing process, the planning team has to take to develop a plan. But once you have the plan, then you need to make sure that it is acted upon. Monthly meetings of one to three hours and spending time on objectives and action plans will ensure focus. Then, once a quarter, allow the team to go off site and review what happened in the quarter and focus on what needs to happen in the next quarter. This will keep everyone aligned on what needs to take place to push the company forward.

ASSESSMENT: STRATEGIC PLANNING

Print this page and place a check mark next to each sentence that speaks to your organization. For each section, 1 check or less = severe problem area; 2 = area needs major improvement; 3 = area needs moderate improvement; 4 = area needs minimal improvement; 5 = system is world-class in this area.

The Planning Team _____ The size of the planning team is nine to 15 members. _____ The CEO assumes an active role in leading the planning team with senior management. _____ The planning team represents different segments of the company, not only executive level staff reporting directly to the CEO. _____ Members of the planning team are chosen because of merit, not rank or entitlement. _____ The team includes an outside facilitator and an internal coordinator.

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