Take a minute to think about driving a car toward a desired destination… where you want to go. While driving, where do you spend most of your time looking? Hopefully, the windshield. In fact, you spend about 80% of your time looking out the windshield while driving. The other 20% of the time is glancing out the rear-view mirror. Although that 20% is important and necessary to safely drive your car, if you don’t spend the majority of your time looking ahead, you will likely go off course and never make it to your destination.
Strategic Planning: Driving to Your Desired Destination
Have you invested countless hours in developing plans to move your business forward, only to set those plans on a shelf and forget about them? Do you find yourself blowing them off a year later and doing it all over again? Have you ever developed plans that missed the mark on what you should have been focused on to strengthen and grow your business? Have you developed plans that never get off the ground because your teams don’t buy-in to what you are trying to do? If you have struggled with any of the above areas, your strategic planning approach needs help.
Creating a Strategic Plan is much like driving your car toward a desired destination. We help you set your sights on where you want to go, but also take brief moments to consider where you’ve been, where you are currently and successfully setting a course to move forward to achieve your desired results.
“Strategic planning does not deal with future decisions, it deals with the futurity of present decisions.”
– Peter Drucker
What is Strategic Planning?
Strategic Planning is an organizational management activity that is used to do the following:
- Set Priorities
- Focus energy and Resources
- Strengthen Operations
- Ensure employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals
- Establish agreement around intended outcomes and results
- Adjust the organization’s direction in response to a changing environment
Business strategy is a critical tool for analyzing the competitive context in which a business operates, and for making informed recommendations for what actions should be taken to gain a competitive advantage. Strategy concerns how organizations can achieve certain goals by allocating appropriate resources to that aim. Strategic formulation is only the first step in successful Strategic Planning. Identifying the path forward for strategic implementation is equally critical.
“Strategy is about setting yourself apart from the competition. It’s not a matter of being better at what you do – it’s a matter of being different at what you do.”
– Michael Porter
How Much Do You Want to Get Done?
What the facts tell us……
Without effective monitoring, most companies will complete only 20-30% of their action plans. With monitoring, the completion rate most often soars to well over 80% completion essentially on time, with good progress on the remaining Objectives.
(www.cssp.com)
The Vantage Group works with you to take a wholistic look at 3 critical aspects to inform your Business strategies:
Business Environment:
Consumers, Competitors, Regulations
Business Resources:
Tangible, Intangible and Human
Business Capabilities:
Durability, Transferability, and Replicability
When developing strategic plans, The Vantage Group works “with you” rather than doing “to you”. It’s critical for the success of the strategic plans you and your teams develop that the ownership and buy-in is present for successful implementation and commitment to regular review.
We take a proactive approach to generating clarity and alignment across your team. We utilize a framework that creates accountability and ownership to the implementation, forward movement, and commitment to regular reviews needed for successful implementation.
Our framework ensures your plans stay relevant, evolves as the business environment requires, identifies resources and capabilities needed all while harnessing the buy-in and support to get the work done.