All Posts Tagged With: "strategic planning"
Strategic Human Resources
Fast Company blogger Seth Kahan recently led a roundtable discussion among senior HR professionals about three tough questions they face (article here):
- How does strategic HR drive competitive excellence?
- What skills does HR need to develop to contribute in the C-suite?
- How is talent acquired to build the future, to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives?
The conversation produced these insights:
- HR is positioned to drive competitive excellence if it is fully aligned with business goals. The Baldrige Criteria ask a key question about this: What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
- Organizational capacity building is a direct and powerful contribution HR can make if it is fully aligned with the future direction of the enterprise. In addition to the question above, the Baldrige Criteria ask: How do you organize and manage your workforce to address your strategic challenges and action plans?
- Senior HR professionals must be well-versed in business drivers including financials, industry, market circumstances, and competitive intelligence to be considered a player in the C-suite.
- As the world transitions from hierarchical leadership to self-organizing collaboration, HR is positioned to support or drive this shift. The HR section of the Baldrige Criteria addresses this shift by asking: How do you foster an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce?
To read more about the role of human resources in helping organizations achieve performance excellence, click…
29Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued7 Rules for an Effective SWOT Analysis
The Baldrige Criteria ask how, as part of your strategic planning process, you collect and analyze relevant data and information pertaining to your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors; opportunities and threats are external factors. A post on RapidBI describes the characteristics of each:
- Strengths are positive tangible and intangible attributes, internal to your organization, that are within its control.
- Weaknesses are factors within your control that detract from your ability to attain your goal, but that you could improve performance on.
- Opportunities represent the reason for your organization to exist and develop; identify them by time frames.
- Threats are beyond your organization’s control, which could place your mission or operation at risk. Classify them by their seriousness and probability of occurrence and develop contingency plans to address them if they occur.
RapidBI describes two acronyms for identifying the factors to address in your SWOT analysis:
- PRIMO-F for strengths and weaknesses: People, Resources, Innovation/Ideas, Marketing, Operations, and Finance
- PESTLE for opportunities and threats: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental
The post offers simple rules for a successful SWOT analysis:
- Be realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of your organization
- Distinguish between where your organization is today and where it could be in the future
- Be specific. Avoid gray areas.
- Always analyze in relation to your competition and whether you are better or worse
- Keep your SWOT short and simple; avoid unnecessary complexity and over analysis
- Don’t list an opportunity if the same opportunity…
Baldrige Model: How do you implement your strategy?
Item 2.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how your organization converts strategic objectives into action plans. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Developing short- and longer-term action plans and deploying them throughout your organization and to key suppliers and partners
- Allocating financial, human, and other resources to support accomplishing the action plans
- Identifying human resource plans that support accomplishing your action plans
- Identifying key performance measures you can use to track performance on your action plans
- Modifying action plans if circumstances change and rapidly executing the new plans
Best practices to consider:
- Aligning the organization’s strategic objectives, action plans, and performance measurement system with action plans and key performance measures for divisions, departments, teams, and individual employees ensures that everyone in the organization is working on what must happen for the organization to succeed.
- The performance management process identifies annual goals and objectives for each employee that support the goals, objectives, and action plans of the organization and department.
- Business planning and strategic planning are part of one process that allocates resources to support the strategic objectives of the organization.
- Human resource plans in such areas as learning and development, recruiting and retaining employees, and increasing employee engagement align with and support the organization’s strategic plan.
Common problems areas:
- No process exists to cascade the strategic plan throughout the organization, which makes it difficult to achieve the…
Baldrige Model: How do you develop your strategy?
The Baldrige Model: How do you develop your strategy?
Item 2.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about your organization’s strategy development process. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Conducting strategic planning, including identifying key steps and participants
- Identifying potential blind spots, core competencies, strategic challenges and advantages, and short- and longer-term planning time horizons
- Collecting and analyzing relevant data and information upon which the strategic plan is based including your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; early indications of disruptive change; long-term organizational sustainability; and your ability to execute your plan
- Identifying strategic objectives that address your challenges, advantages, and opportunities for innovation; capitalize on your core competencies; balance short- and longer-term challenges and opportunities; consider and balance the needs of all key stakeholders; and enhance your ability to adapt to sudden changes in market conditions
Best practices to consider:
- Strategic planning is a continuous process that involves ongoing collection and analysis of relevant data and information, regular review of performance to plan, and the agility to modify the plan as conditions change.
- The strategic planning is inclusive, involving those employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders with unique insight in the planning process.
- Since the quality of a strategic plan depends on the quality of the information upon which it is based, senior leaders and other planning participants are responsible for identifying, analyzing, and communicating…
FREE REPORT: Strategy Development
How do Baldrige Award winners conduct strategic planning? You can learn from the best practices of six recent Award winners in our free report. Enter your name and email address in the purple box on the right and you will receive a PDF that includes:
- The strategic planning processes of four organizations: Heartland Health, Premier, the VACSP Center, and MidwayUSA
- Ideas on how to prepare to plan, including where to look for relevant data and information and how to analyze what you collect (Iredell-Statesville Schools is a example)
- The key questions Cargill Corn Milling asks to determine how it should act within a strategic space
- How these organizations determine and review their core competencies and strategic challenges and advantages
- Four key elements to consider while developing your strategic plan
- How to identify effective strategic objectives
As the report concludes, strategy development at these six Award winners shares common elements that your organization can use to create an effective approach:
- Strategic planning must be a well-defined and refined process that involves key stakeholders in developing strategies. As the diagrams in this report illustrate, a systematic strategic planning process shows who does what, when, with an emphasis on involving key stakeholders in the process.
- Strategy development is an ongoing process. The front end of the process, collecting data and information, occurs daily throughout the year, a responsibility of key people in the organization to find, collect, and communicate what is happening—or may happen—that could affect your organization’s future.…
Identifying Game Changers
I’m getting ready to offer the next free report about best practices among Baldrige Award winners—it’s about strategy development—and an article on CNNMoney.com caught my eye.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how your strategic planning process identifies potential blind spots and how you address early indications of major shifts in technology. One of the favorite examples of why this is important is the market leader in horse-drawn carriages when the first Model T’s appeared: If you don’t have processes in place to detect disruptive technologies or recognize your blind spots, you expose your organization to irrelevance.
The article in CNNMoney.com, available here, has the potential to change how cell phone service is delivered. The explosion of smartphones has stretched wireless networks to the limit, forcing companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint Nextel to cap data, charge for overages, and raise prices on phones and tablet plans. And mobile data usage is expected to grow 30 times in the next four to five years. The cell towers and antennas that create the networks are large, inefficient, and expensive to maintain, costing the industry $210 billion a year to operate and another $50 billion to upgrade.
It’s a perfect climate for innovation, and that innovation may be the lightRadio by Alcatel-Lucent. About the size of a Rubik’s cube, the lightRadio “takes all of the components of a cell phone tower and compresses them down into a 2.3-inch block.” It can be…
22Mar2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedConference on Performance Management & Measurement
If your leaders are looking for insight into issues they are facing, want to learn about strategies for managing change, can benefit from case studies about structured and successful improvement approaches, or are curious about how to integrate Baldrige , especially in the areas of strategic planning and performance measurement, then sign them up for ActiveStrategy’s 2011 conference on May 3rd and 4th in Philadelphia. Click on the blue banner on the right for details. Enter Baldrige11 on the registration page to receive $100 off the cost of the conference.
Held since 2004, the conference features case-study presentations that describe real-life issues and how organizations are dealing with them. It’s a smaller conference—usually around 100 people—that encourages asking questions, discussing problems, and exploring solutions. You will walk away with practical and proven ideas for dealing with your most challenging issues.
Most of the presenters use ActiveStrategy software to turn strategic plans into measurable results, but you don’t have to be an ActiveStrategy client to benefit from the experiences of the presenters, which include:
- Clayton Fitzhugh, executive VP of share services for Catholic Health East, will talk about “A Leader’s Role in Performance Excellence.”
- Allison Diego, assistant director at the Miami-Dade County Park & Recreation Department, will describe her department’s journey to receiving the Florida Sterling Award.
- Scott Walters, vice president of national accounts for AlliedBarton Security Services, will speak on “Using Performance Metrics to Win Business and Manage Customer Relationships.”
- Leaders from Aria Health…
