Implementing a Strategic Plan With "SMART" Objectives
We have previously covered the importance of?strategic planning?and the need for organizations to have a strategic plan, but now what? Having a plan is a great first step, but now that plan must translate into actionable programs and initiatives for your organization. And, you must be able to track progress and measure effectiveness of these activities towards achieving the goals of your strategic plan. A strategic plan should create a multi-year operational plan and allocate the required resources accordingly. We want to share with you some of the thinking and steps necessary to realize that multi-year operational plan.
An organization's strategic plan should contain the mission and vision for the organization and also establish strategic goals - those three items form the top of a hierarchy of a multi-year operational plan as illustrated below.
In order to create this plan, the mission must be clearly understood. The vision may evolve as the market and technology changes, but the strategic plan will have captured a snapshot of the vision at the time of the plan. Most importantly, the strategic plan will have defined goals for the organization over a 3-5 year timeframe as the goals clearly document the priorities of the organization. The team then responsible for creating the multi-year operational plan, should use the goals to derive a series of objectives for the organization that are essentially milestones on a plan/roadmap towards achieving those goals. In order to serve that purpose these objectives should all be?"SMART"?- that is:
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Once objectives for the different goals have been identified, one technique that is useful for collaborative organizations like technology alliance is to then group the objectives into strategic thrusts - a limited number (e.g., 3-4 is preferable). One of these thrusts could be internal (member) focused, one could be market related, and one technically focused. The goals and objectives within these thrusts can then be prioritized and ordered based on priority and resource availability. For each objective, tactics and initiatives to accomplish those objectives should be defined. Each tactic should have resources assigned and an "owner" who is responsible for ensuring the tactic is completed. The figure below summarizes this process describe above for translating strategies into objectives and tactics.
In addition to creating and implementing a multi-year operation plan, the organization must be prepared to measure and monitor the progress of the tactics and achievement of the objectives. Based on the progress and results, course corrections could be necessary (including re-allocation of resources). An annual planning process should examine the results and progress of the prior year, when determining objective and tactics for the coming year, so that lessons-learned and changes in external factors can be taken into account.
The above description of the creation of multi-year operational plans is concise due to the limitations on the length of a newsletter article, but the high-level concept, is indeed, not that complex. However, the actual undertaking of this effort should not be underestimated and there are many resources available that describe this kind of process in much more detail and/or consultants available to assist in this process. While that may seem like a daunting task, the value in realizing an actual plan that enables an organization to achieve its strategic goals is invaluable. In our experience, the best performing organizations are the ones that have strategic plans with accompanying multi-year operational plans that they regularly monitor and track.