4 Tips for Effective Strategy Planning

 

When it comes to designing an effective strategy for your company, often the most important part is to get the right ingredients at the start. Failing to set up the process at this stage will make it harder to communicate and execute strategy further down the line, leaving the whole process without adequate direction.

So, how can you ensure that your strategic planning is working effectively? Here are 4 tips to help you get the most from your planning exercises.

Keep it simple

Strategic planning can easily become a complicated affair. Every large company is likely to have a range of different departments and teams all operating on a variety of different projects. As a result, company strategies keep getting longer and more complicated.

Innovative companies are now recognizing that they need to keep their strategic planning simpler if they want to make their plans understandable and easy to action. Faced with these demands companies are now looking to shrink their plans so that they are easy to comprehend and can achieve real change.

Experiment where possible

There is no reason to assume that your strategic planning will be right straight off the bat. In fact, it can take a number of tries to get the right approach, with no executive too big to avoid making mistakes.

With so much at stake, it pays to test the initiatives you have established. Setting up a small experiment within a segment of the company will let you trial out your strategy and iron out any mistakes before rolling out the strategy to the rest of the company.

Get the right oversight

Central to the success of any strategic planning exercise is going to be getting the right levels of oversight for your initiatives. If you are trialing a number of different strategies, while also trying to measure the implementation of others, things can easily fall through the gaps.

Embedding your strategy into a strategy planning software option like StrategyBlocks can ensure that every aspect of your corporate direction is mapped appropriately and will give you the right levels of oversight.

Understand the objectives

Finally, good strategic planning will only be effective if you have the right direction to drive this growth. Having a clear goal in mind, and designing an approach which can meet this goal is essential for the success of you corporate initiatives.