Assure Your Success in Strategic Planning

By Bill Birnbaum

To assure your success in strategic planning, follow these nine tips:

1. Carefully select the members of your planning team.

Use two criteria for selection - first make sure you include those who can, and will, contribute positively to the content of your resultant plan. Second, make sure you also include those who are positioned to drive the successful implementation of the strategies within the plan. That means leaders - both formal (per the organization chart) leaders and informal (natural) leaders.

2. Educate your planning team members to the strategic planning process.

Make sure they all understand the definition of, and the importance of, key terms like, "mission" and "objective." The best form of education is a participatory workshop in which your planning team members "roll up their sleeves" and work on a case study. By doing so, they'll actually experience developing a strategic plan.

3. Involve employees beyond those on your planning team.

Let them know you value their participation - for you'll later need their help in implementing your strategy. Have them participate in pre-planning surveys to "bubble up" issues for discussion at your up-coming strategy sessions. And be sure to offer them feedback on the outcome of those sessions. Remember, asking for their input implies a promise to feed back. If you forget that feedback, they'll feel cheated.

4. Gather applicable information prior to your strategy sessions.

Have your planning team think through the issues you'll likely discuss at your up-coming strategy sessions. Next, decide on the information you'll need to deal with those issues and to arrive at strategic decisions. Then, prior to your strategy sessions, gather and share that information among the members of your planning team. And when gathering information, you have yet another opportunity to involve employees beyond those on your planning team.

5. Hold your strategy sessions away from your office.

Avoid the interruptions and distractions which so often arise when your offices are "just down the hall." It's too easy for a meeting member to step out "for just a moment" to check a message, and return much, much later. Don't fall victim. Meet "off campus."

6. Encourage open communication.

If you're the boss, you'll play the most difficult role in the strategic planning process. For you'll walk the fine line between being an active participant and coming across as "too strong." And because you're the boss, others will hear your voice a bit more loudly than the other voices. Tone it down a bit and encourage others to participate.

7. Link your strategic plan to your budget.

Have your employees develop specific tactics to implement your strategy. Then estimate the resources required to accomplish those tactics. In estimating resources, include: people, money, facilities and equipment. As these resource estimates feed into the budget, your budgeting cycle should, ideally, follow development of your strategies and tactics.

8. Communicate your strategy.

Once you've assured that you have the resources for implementation, tell your employees of your strategy. After all, it is they who will help with its implementation. And don't just tell 'em once. Tell 'em again. And again.

9. Keep your plan alive.

Hold quarterly review meetings to monitor progress of your strategic plan. Remember, it's one thing to develop a strategy, and quite another to implement it successfully. This is hard work! You'll need to manage it as such.

Bill Birnbaum, CMC, is President of Birnbaum Associates, business strategy consultants. He helps clients develop a shared strategic vision, and then turn that vision into a sound business strategy. Bill has served on the board of directors for three high growth corporations. He's taught strategy courses for the American Management Association and authored "Strategic Thinking: A Four Piece Puzzle" (Douglas Mountain Publishing, 2004). His book is available through book stores and on-line book sellers. His website contains informative articles on strategic thinking, on business strategy and on economic trends affecting business: http://www.BirnbaumAssociates.com/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Birnbaum

Sales Strategic Planning

By Gordon Petten

Strategic planning is the exercise that organizations struggle with in defining their sales strategies plans and the future direction of the company. This article addresses a few ideas to assist you in the sales part of the overall sales strategies plan.

A great series of starter questions should be answered right at the start.

What do you want to do?

Run the business
Or

Grow the business

Or

Transform the business

Run the business: Status quoi, business as usual, just like before, keep the lights on. No big
changes.

Grow the business: Increase revenues/sales, grow markets, and add resources, facilities and people, expand.

Transform the business: Big changes, risk, new stuff, different markets, products, channels, skills and resources.

Now keep these three questions in mind through the process, write them out on a flip chart or white board.

1 What is it that we do?
2 Who is our target, who do we do it for?
3 How do we do it better, how do we excel over others that we compete with?

Where to start:

If you have recently had a detailed assessment of the sales group done great if not I suggest you get one done to establish a true baseline for all of your decisions. The sales strategies plan should be done by the senior management team and within reason should be completed without consideration of the ability to execute. (I will explain later) It is important to get buy in with the entire team for all parts of the sales strategies plan. Start by establishing a time frame for the sales strategies plan. There is a ton of information on the web regarding details that will help you through this sales strategies process. Outline the sales strategies plan, establish strategic objectives and goals identify key strategic projects and stack rank them in order of importance to the overall sales strategies plan and then for each ask yourself the following two questions about each.

1 How important is this to the business
2 What is our ability as an organization to execute?

If it's very important to the business and you can execute with ease then it should go to the top of the list. If it is not so important and very difficult to execute on then it should go to the bottom of the list ..

Now what can you expect from the current sales group to do their part. There will probability be a gap between what you need and what they can deliver.

The model is simple and if you spend a few minutes understanding its power it will explain what you have to do. It goes on to explain the steps required to complete a sales strategies plan
Dealing with the gap: You will recall that I asked you to develop the sales strategies plan without constrengths. That is because I believe that you should be able to dream, vision what the future should hold without always being concerned that the sales group may not be capable of delivering. We can fix that; you can fix that...close the gap and manage the business towards those goals without being weighted down by doubt and uncertainty.

Keep it simple; check out Google see strategic planning and good luck!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gordon_Petten

Strategic Planning and Six Sigma

By Tony Jacowski

Six Sigma has been basically used either for improvement of existing processes or in designing a new product or process.

The basic concept of Strategic Six Sigma is to analyze likely variations and risks in a system under consideration for a strategy and apply DMAIC philosophy-based tools for process improvement.

Planning

Strategic planning as applied to Six Sigma involves detailed and systematic planning in areas of concern that have far-reaching and tactical implications at the project selection stage. The purpose of strategic planning is to develop relevant decisions and actions that guide successful Six Sigma implementation.

A major constituent that helps combine the vision of the leader with the working of the organization is strategic programming. It helps give an entirely new direction to organizational growth. Uncertainty about the future is reduced to some extent with the linking of visions of the action plans that result in tangible results. Six Sigma takes strategic planning to different heights by achieving these results.

Adequate planning is the key for success. Planning is the detailed statement of vision of the leader of the company and that holds true for large corporations as well as smaller organizations. The employees have to overcome many hurdles to achieve the transformation of vision into tangible gains.

Customer satisfaction is the success of Six Sigma.

Sharing Of the Vision

For the transformation of vision to gains, it is important that all know this vision. It has to be shared with all stakeholders and everyone should relate to it. The employees should be made aware to the fact that their actions relate to customer reactions directly.

Another important concept is connecting with the customer. Customers should participate and be involved in defining their needs. The tools of Six Sigma make it easy and simple to create this link in between the key elements, activities, strategies and the vision, which leads to smooth sharing of ideas.

The Six Sigma methodology allows effective communication of the vision to all concerned in a language understandable to them.

Prioritizing Matters

Six Sigma team leaders may get slowed down if they involve themselves in day-to-day matters and minute details. Two tools of Six Sigma, key requirements and differentiators, ensure that the importance or irrelevance of the data is highlighted and the relevant ones taken care of preferentially.

This ultimately results in helping the leaders to concentrate on important activities, and stay away from trivial mundane matters.

Blunders in Six Sigma Strategic Planning

There are some common mistakes made in Six Sigma strategic planning that you should avoid. Human capital is of high importance; they are the assets of the company. Planning should involve consideration of the core competencies of these people. The leaders should put forth this challenge to give them that competitive edge.

There is no link between the actions and the strategy if the chances of implementation of the plan are zero. The aim should be to provide necessary and sufficient tactics to achieve strategic success and modify the strategy to be realistic. The simple thing to do is develop strategy statements that point toward specific actions, rather than just making a statement. Translate strategy statements into strategic objectives and quantify them. Prioritize and define projects to meet the important objectives.

The last thing in ineffective Six Sigma planning is poor communication. The vision cannot be shared effectively if it is poorly communicated. Make the statement as clear and simple as possible - and to the point.

Six Sigma project deployments are related firmly to strategic planning. It means that the company leadership recognizes the need to complete retooling of the organization. This unique combination allows robustness with flexibility to deal with unique challenges.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for all types of six sigma professionals including, lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tony_Jacowski