How to write a strategic... Strategic Plan

Many Strategic Plans just aren’t that strategic. They are at best simply a plan to do some obvious things to reach some predictable outcomes.

The word strategy should evoke notions of surprise, subterfuge, counter move or gambit. A Strategic Plan for that reason should be a highly classified document, whose performance is closely monitored. Instead, Strategic Plans are often simply an internal communications or marketing tool for the Board and executive to convey what they want the business to attempt to achieve over the next few years. Often with grandiose goals, little strategic detail, and vague accountability.

So how might you go about creating a plan that is truly strategic?

1. Research – understand and evaluate how the business works today, its current market offerings and its context, the market in which it operates, customer needs and preferences, and its key suppliers and partners.

2. Drivers – use the information gathered to identify the important external and internal circumstances, events, trends, developments and opportunities that the business needs to respond to in order to maintain an ability to continue to play in the market.

3. Goals – for every significant driver identify at least one corresponding desired or required outcome that must be realised within the lifespan of the plan (e.g., market dominance, or creation of a new market segment). Describe each outcome in some detail and assess impact and feasibility.

4. Strategies – for every chosen goal go through a strategic design process to identify:

- Existing capability strengths that could be bought to bear to achieve the goal

- Existing circumstances (external or internal) that present opportunities the business could exploit to help achieve the goal

- Missing or inadequate business capability needed to achieve the goal – given the existing strengths and opportunities.

- Rearguard actions that will need to be undertaken to minimise the risk of the strategy being compromised (e.g., ensuring competitors remain unaware)

- The executive sponsor (extremely important).

- The budget allocation

5. Monthly Performance Indicators – develop a set of measures for each strategy statement that measure the strategy’s:

- Achievement of the goal (i.e., the outcome)

- Deployment of the intended existing capability

- Use of identified existing opportunities

- Investment in and building of identified missing or inadequate capability

- Investment in and completion of the identified risk mitigation actions

Those are the broad steps. The design process itself requires a cross-section of perspectives from participants from customer service, marketing, finance, procurement, IT, and HR, and to provide the space for ideas to be generated, pitched, tested, refined and agreed.