Join a monthly Strategy Planning Senior Executive Peer Roundtable at Arcus. You will share ideas and learn from 8 senior executives fro other industries in a confidential 1-2 hour informal setting. In today’s increasingly competitive business environment, budget-oriented and forecast-based planning methods are not enough. Demands on the time of managers and executives are ever increasing, and so to is the pressure to cut costs, improve performance and increase profits. This session will provide you with an overview of the resources that you need to build a realistic strategic planning process that can be applied at all levels of the organization.
- Identifying key business issues and opportunity gaps in your division and in your business as a whole
- Identifying good project leaders for strategy implementation
- How to create departmental action plans
- Resource allocation reviews to determine final priorities
CONDUCTING AN INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & EVALUATING THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT
Scanning the external macro-environment in which a company operates is an integral component of strategic planning. There is sometimes the feeling that forward planning is futile because it will be overwhelmed by unanticipated events and developments. Uncertainty is, indeed, a major problem in forward planning. However, the greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for good strategic planning. This session will explore how to analyze the position of your business within its industry and broader business environment to maximize outcomes of business decisions at all levels of the organization.
- Identifying and analyzing all key external factors and market forces
- Industry and competitive analysis checklists
- Relating environmental change to strategy formation
STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION BEST PRACTICES
Successful strategy implementers generate strong enterprise-wide commitment for carrying out an organization’s strategy throughout the business and require a variety of techniques that will translate the strategic agenda into results. This session will help you to boost your strategic implementation skills for understanding this process.
- Understanding the key managerial components for implementing strategy
- Linking organizational structure to your strategy
- Balancing action plans with resources
- Gaining commitment from management and staff
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS & LEARNING TO ALLOCATE YOUR RESOURCES
The logical first step in starting the strategic conversation is to gauge the understanding of the current profile of your organization. This depends to a large extent on the implications of your current organizational culture at different levels within your entity. A situational analysis involves looking within and conducting a comprehensive scan of the internal factors affecting the organization. This can be done at any level or function within the organization. Master your understanding of the basic thinking process steps by learning how to:
- Conduct stakeholder analysis
- Analyze your product/service offerings and identify customers needs
- Assess strengths and weaknesses of product, division, function or organization
- Decide where to allocate resources and measure program effectiveness
SETTING A REALISTIC SCHEDULE FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING
Successful implementation does not mean that there will be no bumps in the road along the way. However setting a realistic schedule for carrying out the strategy will improve chances of a smooth process. Scheduling requires that such factors as training time, periods of low productivity, increased error rates and slowdowns be accounted for in any business plan. Planned checkpoints also become integral to assessing progress towards full implementation. This session will provide a toolkit to developing effective schedules and control systems needed for effective strategic planning.
- Using standards as specific operative goals and assessing business performance relative to these goals
- Key design decisions in setting up an effective control system
- What areas need to be focused on to achieve success and how to measure that success
STRATEGIC PLANNING TOOLS
The basic strategic architecture of your organization, which determines its competitiveness, success and sustainability, includes aspects like its purpose and vision, its selected business domain, its profit model, its value propositions, its competitive positioning and its business model. This session will help you to develop a thorough understanding of the practical tools for analyzing the impact of these variables on your strategy.
- Using value maps to understand how to drive shareholder value
- Using scenario planning to create strategic flexibility
- Converting qualitative discussions into ranked evaluations of key factors
AVOIDING PITFALLS IN STRATEGIC PLANNING
Strategic planning has its limitations. It is not the answer to all managerial problems. External forces may not react as planned. Factors such as changes in economic activity or a sudden change in prices by competitors are uncertainties that can affect the outcome of any plan. A significant amount of time and other costs may be required for effective planning. This session will look at avoiding pitfalls in the strategic planning process.
- Using value maps to understand how to drive shareholder value
- Using scenario planning to create strategic flexibility
- Converting qualitative discussions into ranked evaluations of key factors
COMMUNICATING YOUR STRATEGIC PLAN WITH EMPLOYEES/TEAM
Critical to the successful implementation of a strategic plan is effective communication in order to ensure the alignment of everyone in the organization with strategy. While this is generally understood, there is often difficulty in effectively communicating strategies to people outside of the strategic planning team. This session will look at effective communications practices aimed at improving commitment of all stakeholders and consistency in the approach of carrying out the plan at all levels of the business.
- Communicating the strategy to employees who did not participate in strategic planning process
- Assigning responsibilities and setting individual and group goals
- Introducing key performance measures
DEVELOPING PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES FOR MEASURING YOUR STRATEGIC PLAN
Vague objectives may make your management team comfortable by giving them wiggle room, but concrete, measurable objectives with deadline dates are better for quickly clarifying the results that you are seeking. To be successful with a strategic plan you need to make decisions that guide your organization towards achieving its desired outcomes and measure these results against your expectations. In this session you’ll gain an overall framework for monitoring and measuring a dynamic plan.
- Measuring financial, customer, internal process and support function performance
- Lead and lag performance indicators
- Corrective measures to overcome the cause for discrepancies between planned and actual results