All Posts Tagged With: "strategic plan"
The First Critical Phase of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is one of seven Baldrige categories. Organizations that conduct Baldrige assessments tend to do reasonably well at plan development, which is usually an annual process that involves a specified group of people in producing a strategic plan document. They tend to do less well at deploying that plan throughout the organization, the “plan gathering dust on the shelf” syndrome. But where they really struggle is with the first part of the process, which is gathering, analyzing, and reporting the information and data upon which the strategic plan is built.
A strategic plan is only as good as the information upon which it is based. The Baldrige Criteria specify some of the key factors that need to be considered as you develop your plan:
- Potential blind spots
- Your core competencies, strategic challenges, and strategic advantages
- Your organizations strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- (SWOT analysis)
- Early indications of major shifts in technology, products, customer
- preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment
- Long-term organizational sustainability, including core competencies you need
- Your ability to execute the strategic plan
Considering these factors is not a cursory exercise. Baldrige Award winners have processes in place to identify who will gather information about each and how it will be presented and discussed.
One area that can be…
15Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen Innovation and Planning Collide
Are a systematic strategic planning process and a formal strategic plan detrimental to innovation and agility?
I’ve recently worked with an entrepreneurial company that has more than two thousand employees worldwide and annual revenues approaching a half-billion dollars—and it has no strategic planning process. Its “strategic plan” is whatever the founder and CEO decides to pursue, which means the plan has many consistent elements year to year plus a stream of new ventures that aren’t even on the radar screen when the year begins. It’s a highly innovative, flexible, and agile company that has grown by 15% or more a year for nearly three decades. Such results suggest that its “strategy” is working.
From a Baldrige perspective, however, I can see how a more systematic approach could be beneficial, especially in the areas of:
- Involvement by more participants. More voices in the discussion would help clarify the issues and the opportunities and engage more people in owning the plans they help design.
- Inputs to the process. A more formal approach to gathering and analyzing critical information upon which any plans are based would minimize the risk of missing something important.
- Alignment. A company aligns its people with what it is trying to accomplish through a strategic plan…
Start Aligning Now!
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award winners is the alignment they achieve of processes, individual performance, measurement systems, strategic plans, and results with the mission, vision, and goals of the organization. When everything and everyone is pulling in the same direction, an organization can produce and sustain performance excellence.
According to the Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado, organizations that decide to systematically improve their management systems can and should work on alignment right from the start. In a presentation at the twelfth Quest for Excellence this year, Monfort emphasized four dimensions that need to be aligned right away:
- Stakeholder needs and relationships
- Organization structures and systems to address those needs
- Performance measures to track performance and progress
- Strategic goals and objectives
You can view the slides in the presentation by visiting Monfort’s Web site here. The presentation is relevant to any type of organization because the concepts, like the Baldrige model, are applicable to all organizations.
The sixth slide in the PDF presentation shows how Montfort defined a student-centered process framework, identifying key stakeholders and their needs and relationships on one slide. The next two slides overlay Monfort’s management control system to show who is responsible for meeting these needs.
Like…
5Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Important Question in Strategy
One of the key issues in strategic planning is not directly addressed by the Baldrige Criteria. It occurs during the strategy development phase of the process as participants analyze relevant data and information about factors that will shape the plan and then use their analysis to agree on what should be in the plan. Coming to agreement can be a contentious debate, one opinion competing with another, with decisions made based on who ranks the highest or makes the best argument or outlasts opposing views.
It’s not the best way to chart a course.
Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He has facilitatestrategic planning sessions. In “My Eureka Moment with Strategy” (HBR, May 3, 2010), he tells the story of a planning session with ten mining company executives that “quickly descended into adversarial position-taking and I could tell it was going nowhere.”
He stopped the descent by asking the executives a different question. Instead of one person making his case and everyone else telling him why he was wrong, Martin asked the executives “to specify what would have to be true for the option on the table to be a fantastic choice.” Instead of competitors,…
6Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedAligning Individual Performance with Your Mission and Vision
In most organizations, the mission and vision have little to do with what gets done day-to-day. Even if employees know what the mission and vision are—and very few do—they fail to see how their work contributes to achieving them. Instead, departments, teams, and individuals focus on different things, on what the boss tells them is important or the company decides to target that year or the latest problem needing to be fixed. Rather than pulling together toward shared goals, they are pulled apart by shifting priorities and diverging objectives.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award recipients is how well they align people, plans, and processes with the mission and vision of the organization. Every department, team, and individual not only knows what the mission and vision are, but they also understand what they must do to support them. The connection between an employee’s work and the mission and vision of his/her organization is documented and measurable.
Poudre Valley Health System, which won the Baldrige Award in 2008, calls this its “Global Path to Success.” Like other Award recipients, it uses its strategic plan and balanced scorecard to cascade its vision, mission, values, and strategic objectives throughout the organization, as shown…
23Dec2009 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedAnticipating Disruptive Change
I have a friend who has invested in several alternative energy companies. He even runs a few. I thought about him when I read an article in the most recent Time magazine.
Titled “Tech Pioneers Who Will Change Your Life,” the article introduces eight innovators and their innovations. Three specifically target alternative energy:
- Bloom Energy has made an efficient, affordable fuel cell that could allow villages, businesses, and residents to produce their own power rather than relying on centralized power, a big deal in areas of the world that lack an energy infrastructure.
- VNL serves the same need with a low-cost, voice-only, solar-powered mobile telephone base station, a big deal when a quarter of the world’s population has no electricity.
- Boston-Power is developing the next-generation lithium-ion battery, a big deal for everything from portable computing to electric vehicles.
These are disruptive technologies. If you are involved in alternative energy and fail to see the impact of these technologies, your investment of time and money may be lost, and your business may not survive.
The Baldrige Criteria try to prepare you for this. They ask about key changes taking place that affect your competitive situation and key strategic challenges that affect your organization’s sustainability. In the strategic planning category,…
21Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCreating a Balanced Scorecard
Performance measurement improved significantly with the advent of the balanced scorecard. Before that, no matter what an organization did, it tended to emphasize one set of measures at the expense of all others. Businesses focused on financial performance. Schools targeted test scores. Government concentrated on…I have no idea.
Each set of measures was important but just part of a bigger picture, and each a lagging indicator of performance on all of the processes that produced these results.
The balanced scorecard directs leaders’ attention to how their organization operates, and how it operates determines how it will perform. A scorecard is also a powerful tool for aligning the activities of an organization with its vision, mission, goals, and objectives. Most Baldrige Award winners rely on balanced scorecards, along with their strategic plans, to focus everyone on what the organization must do to succeed.
I recently sat in on a Webinar by Stacey Barr, a performance measurement expert, in which someone asked a basic question about how you figure out what to measure. The Baldrige Criteria put it this way: How do you select data and information for tracking daily operations and overall organizational performance?
Barr suggested asking a different question. Rather than thinking about how…
14Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
