Seven Steps to Successful Strategic Planning  

By Charles Markline

Does your organization have a strategic plan? Is it real or a figment of management's imagination? Does it sound nice, but sit in a desk drawer somewhere having no effect whatsoever on day-to-day operations?

Are you ready to give up, or would you like to make your plan more useful?

Whether an organization will succeed or fail often hinges upon strategic planning. Consider this: IBM, General Electric, Xerox and Mazda all share three common factors - success, competent strategic planning, and viable organization policy. On the other hand, W.T. Grant, Minnie Pearl's Fried Chicken, and Braniff Airlines, at the time of their demise or decline, possessed three common factors - failure, inadequate strategic management, and dysfunctional organizational policy.

In the short run, any organization with a strategic advantage can survive and even prosper, but in the long run only those organizations that practice sound strategic management will be able to grow and survive.

To give your strategic plan more power, develop the following seven-step process.

Step 1 - Develop your mission statement . A mission statement should provide the core reason for your organization's existence - its purpose. Usually stated in broad terms, a mission statement should be a unifying point for all organizational activities and should describe the organization's ideal. A mission statement is an image of a desired state of affairs that inspires action, determines behavior, and fuels motivation. For example, the mission of a school district might be: "to provide the citizens of this district with quality education programs and facilities that enable its students and graduates to excel in life, while at the same time, providing an environment for all district employees to enhance their skills."

Step 2 - Develop your values . Value statements back up and support your mission statement. They should provide a guide to decisions and embellish on the basic organizational beliefs. Looked at another way, value statements show what you hold near and dear. It is an integrity check, a way of life; it sets the tone for the organization and compels management decisions. An example of a value statement is "We will adhere to the highest standards of ethical conduct in everything we do and in all dealings with the customer, suppliers, and among our fellow work team members" (An aerospace Fortune 100 company).

Step 3 - Assess your situation - internally and externally . Assess the current situation inside your organization, locally and corporate-wide. Assess the external situation by studying your customers, competitors, the economy (locally and nationally), etc. Use the SWOT technique: Determine your organization's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (challenges).

Step 4 - Develop your goals . Goal statements must be complementary to, and take off from, your mission and value statements. The goals in your strategic plan provide you with general direction and guidance for developing specific objectives and actions. An example of a goal statement is "To encourage and promote community participation in City Government at all levels" (Municipal government).

Step 5 - Develop your Objectives . Objectives are specific steps you must take to implement your strategy. An objective describes a result to be accomplished by a specific individual or team within a specific period of time. Describe results that have a positive effect on the bottom line or on the members of the organization and in ways that can be clearly measured. Objectives need to meet the following criteria:

A. Objectives should state explicitly, in writing, what is to be accomplished, by whom, and by when (what, who, when).

B. Objectives should be realistic with respect to the abilities and the potential of the people involved and to the environment in which the objectives will be met.

C. Objectives must carry built-in evaluation. They must be stated in measurable terms. For example, a school district's goal might be to improve the academic environment and to enhance options for the students. An objective of this goal would be: "Add a course in Advanced Composition and Advanced Spanish to the curriculum by September 1997 (Action: High School Principal)." Note the agreement between the goal and objective and how the objective is stated in terms of what, who, and when.

Step 6 - Develop an implementation plan . Implementation is where most organizations fail in doing their strategic planning. Implementation must address anything and anyone affected by a strategic plan, and take into account anyone who must contribute to the accomplishment of specific objectives. An easy way to accomplish this is by using TEMPS 2 . TEMPS 2 stands for time, training, equipment, evaluation, money, materials, people, policies & procedures, systems and schedule. These cover all of the possibilities to be considered in your implementation planning activities. For each of these terms you need to list, in detail, the activities involved to satisfy these terms. For each activity, list who is responsible and the required completion date.

Step 7 - Collect feedback and make ongoing improvements . Make sure you build in regular updates (perhaps weekly or monthly) to keep track of your planning process and to measure progress toward your goals.

Once you have developed the Strategic Plan and put it into effect it is important to follow through. Do what you say you'll do when you say you'll do it. Tie individual employee's objectives to the corporate objectives by being clear about what must be done, by whom, and what the payoffs will be. Make sure to provide ongoing feedback and progress reports.

One of the primary functions of a successful leader is to establish, develop, articulate, and reinforce the organization's mission, values, and goals. For a strategic plan to be effective - and not dismissed as worthless by the work force - leaders have to live, model and continually beat the drums about the vision and the planning process.

Charles K. Markline, PhD, Senior Consultant. Published in The Lakewood Report September, 1996