Which of the following is the main reason organizations fail to execute plans effectively?
“Why isn’t my strategy working?” Statistics around the failure rates of corporate strategies vary—some put it as high as 9 out of 10 while others say nearly 7 out of 10. It doesn’t matter which number is right; both estimates are higher than they should be. That means the majority of organizations are floundering when it comes to crafting and executing their strategy. Many executives, when faced with these stats, are wondering, “How do I avoid coming up short in my strategy?” Show
Based on our experience, we know that following this three-phase approach will significantly increase your odds of getting high-quality results. So let’s get started. In This Article
What is strategic planning and why is it important?On one hand, that definition makes strategy planning sound like a Business 101 concept—define your goals and a plan to achieve them. Unfortunately, the strategic planning process isn’t as straightforward as it seems, especially for large companies. Some experts say there’s a simple explanation behind the dismal statistics mentioned above: companies are failing to strategize at all. They may talk a good game and be able to explain an innovative new mission, but they cannot articulate the processes and business models that will make it happen. As a result, nothing about their way of doing business—including their priorities, projects, or culture—changes. Months or years later, strategic leaders are left wondering why the company never achieved what was intended. This absence of a strategic plan demonstrates why having one is so important. The strategic planning process is about looking forward, outside the immediate future for your organization, to reach a particular set of goals. But as noted in the definition above, it also involves laying out—step-by-step—how you’re going to get there. Without this foundation in place, you’ll either continue on a path to nowhere, or get caught up in a tornado of urgent activities that may not actually benefit your organization in the long term. Neither of these scenarios will give you the competitive edge you hoped for. There are also plenty of organizations that do take steps to fulfill the requirements of strategic planning, yet still fail to see results. These strategies fail for many reasons, including:
Whatever is preventing you from meeting your strategic goals—whether it’s the absence of a strategic plan altogether or an imperfect plan execution—it’s worth your time to address the issue. Analysis has shown that strategic planning has a positive and significant impact on organizational performance. Most importantly, it enhances an organization’s ability to achieve its goals, but there’s more to it than that. Because strategic planning forces companies to adopt a long-term view, it helps them better prepare for the future, setting them up to initiate influence instead of just responding to situations. It also strengthens communication between employers and employees. The participation and dialogue that takes place among managers and employees throughout the strategic planning process improves transparency and engagement on everyone’s part. However, the same team that conducted the above analysis also noted that, for strategic planning to work, it requires some specific ingredients, including formal analysis of the internal and external environment, consideration of several strategic options, and careful consideration around whom to involve during the different steps of the strategic planning process. We’ll go through all these ingredients—and more—in the strategic planning guide that follows. Chapter 1: Prepare For Strategic PlanningStep 1: Gather your team, set up meetings, and create a timeline.Get the right people involved.Let’s get one thing straight right now: If your organization has turned to you (or your department, a colleague, etc.) and requested that you “make a strategic plan and then report back to the leadership team when you’re done”—stop right where you are. That’s not an effective plan. Why? You need to have buy-in across your organization, and so you need leadership involvement from the beginning. Now let’s talk about the major player needed for this process: The strategic planner. The strategic planner’s job is to align thoughts from the leadership team with a process the organization can use to execute on their strategy. If this is your role (or even if you’re just highly involved in the process), this guide will be immensely helpful as you navigate the coordination of the strategy. The strategic planner will also need the help of a cross-functional team that involves members of the board or leadership, along with representatives from finance, human resources, operations, sales, and any other critical functions. We’ll discuss this further when we talk through the Office of Strategy Management. Set up your strategy review meetings.This is also a good time to think about your strategy review meetings, which are a necessity for staying on track over the long haul. However, try to avoid adding yet another meeting onto everyone’s plates; instead, there may be a current meeting you can replace or redesign to make time for strategy discussion. For now, decide how often you’ll meet and who should be involved. As for timing, there are three types of strategy review meetings:
For each of these, you’ll want to send out calendar invites in advance and make sure people know these meetings are a top priority. Monthly meetings typically include department heads and subject matter experts. Quarterly review meetings may include department heads and upper management. Annual refresh meetings may include upper levels of management and occasionally board members. Create a reasonable timeline.Next, you need to work out a timeline in which you can complete your strategic plan and move through the process. Reasonable is the key word here, as that depends on your organization’s maturity level with regard to strategic planning.
Whatever the case, don’t expect this to be done by the end of the week. You’ll be disappointed. Step 2: Gather the inputs to your Strategic Plan.Get appropriate background information for your strategic plan.Now it’s time to dig into your internal and external information.
Once you’ve gathered up the quantitative data from the sources above, you’ll also want to get feedback from a number of different sources:
Combined, all of this data will help you get a better grasp on the future of the business. Don’t reinvent the wheel—use our assortment of strategic planning templates to get your strategy up and running more easily. See our most popular templates here. A SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This exercise offers a helpful way to think about and organize your internal and external data.
Sometimes it is helpful to use the SWOT analysis framework to organize your interview questions for your qualitative data gathering. Porter’s Five Forces is another tool used to find these inputs. It’s a time-honored strategy execution framework built around the competition in your industry. Who are your rivals? What are they doing? You then need to look at the threat of substitutes. Is there another product consumers could purchase instead of your industry’s product, for example, substituting natural gas or solar for coal when it comes to electricity generation? Now that you’ve prepared for your strategy...
Chapter 2: Create Your Strategic PlanYou now have all the background information necessary to create your strategic plan! But this plan doesn’t live in a vacuum—so we’ll start by revisiting your mission and vision statements and then get into the nuts and bolts of the planning process. Step 1: Confirm your mission and vision statements.Mission & VisionIf you haven’t created formal mission and vision statements, this is the time to do so.
Where the mission is timeless, your vision is time-bound and more tangible. How To Write A Vision Statement: 6 Best PracticesTwo tools that will help build your mission and vision statements:
If you’ve already created mission and vision statements, confirm that both are aligned with your current strategy before proceeding to the next step. Step 2: Build out your five-year plan.Develop the framework that will hold your high-level priorities.You can use your OAS or Strategic Shift exercises to help you define your priorities and objectives—but more importantly, you need a way to manage these elements. The way to do that is by selecting and developing a strategy management framework that will bring all your priorities together in one cohesive format. Using a framework such as Balanced Scorecard (BSC), Theory of Change (TOC), or Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is critical to your strategic success. Many management teams fail at this point simply because of their disorganization! Note: Choose only one of these three frameworks, as they have numerous similarities! Build your strategic plan with our Strategic Plan TemplateThe Balanced ScorecardThe Balanced Scorecard, developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, has been one of the world’s top strategy management frameworks since its introduction in the early 1990s. Those who use the BSC do so to bring their strategy to life, communicate it across their organization, and track their strategy progress and performance. The BSC divides up your objectives by perspectives—financial, customer, process, and people—and themes, like innovation, customer management, operational excellence, etc. (The idea of perspectives is fully developed in Norton and Kaplan’s book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action.) Here’s an example:
For an in-depth look at how your organization could use the BSC, check out this Full & Exhaustive Balanced Scorecard Example. Theory Of Change (TOC)The Theory of Change is a logic model that describes a step-by-step approach to achieving your vision. The TOC is focused on how to achieve the change you’re looking for, and is popular amongst mission-driven organizations who are describing a change they’re making in the world instead of putting change in their pockets. The idea behind TOC is that if you have the right people doing the right activities, they’ll affect change on your customers, which will impact your financials, and bring you closer to your vision. A great example of a this theory of change is the nonprofit RARE. According to the Harvard Family Research Project, the steps to create a TOC are:
Objectives & Key Results (OKR)OKR was originally created by Intel and is used today in primarily two ways: At the enterprise/department level and at the personal performance level.
The idea is that your defined objectives and measurements help employees, managers, and executives link to and align with overall strategic priorities. Not only does OKR strive to measure whether objectives are successful, but also how successful they are. Define your objectives, measures, and projects. The strategic planning frameworks above are all meant, in different ways, to help you organize your objectives, measures, and projects. So it’s critical that these elements are well thought-out and defined. Here’s how objectives, measures, and projects interact: You have a high-level goal in mind—your objective. Your measures answer the question, “How will I know that we’re meeting our goal?” From there, initiatives, or projects, are put in place to answer the question, “What actions are we taking to accomplish our goals?” We’ve defined each of these concepts more thoroughly below with a few business strategy examples:
Create your strategy map or graphic strategic model.Whether or not you’re using a Balanced Scorecard as your strategy framework, you’ll benefit from using a graphic model to represent your strategic plan. While many people use a strategy map (shown in the example below), you could also use icons or a color-coding system to visually understand how the elements of your strategy work together. If you’re just becoming familiar with how strategy mapping works, this article will teach you exactly how to read one—and what you need to do to create one. Now that you’ve created your strategic vision...
Chapter 3: Put Your Strategic Plan Into PracticeYou’ve made it this far—now you have to be sure you launch correctly! To do so, you need someone from the Office of Strategy Management to push that process, ensure resources are aligned to your strategy, put a solid strategy communication program in place, and get technology to keep you organized. Step 1: Launch your strategy.Ensure the Office of Strategy Management (OSM) is pushing things forward.The Office of Strategy Management is comprised of a group of people responsible for coordinating strategy implementation. This team isn’t responsible for doing everything in your strategy, but it should oversee strategy execution across the organization. Typically, the OSM lives in the finance department—or it could be its own separate division that reports directly to the CEO. Create your internal and external strategy communication plan.Internal—Be sure all elements of your strategy—like strategy maps or logic models—are contained within a larger strategic plan document. (If you use strategy software, the strategic plan document will likely be contained there.) A great way to be sure your leadership team has a firm grasp on your strategy is to ensure they each have a copy of this document, and they can describe the strategy easily to someone who wasn’t involved in the creation process. This free Balanced Scorecard template will help you become the strategy superhero your company needs.More broadly, the strategy must be communicated throughout your organization. You should be shouting it from the rooftops to keep it top-of-mind across your organization. People won’t give it a passing thought unless you engage them—so every department head should be charged with explaining how their team fits into the strategy and why it matters. For actionable tips, check out this article that highlights how you can effectively communicate your strategic plan across your organization. External—You also need to be sure you have a plan for communicating your strategy outside the organization—with board members, partners, or customers (particularly if your organization is municipal or nonprofit). Think through how it will be shared, and which parts of it are relevant to outside parties. Align your resources to your strategy.In the short term—which would be your next budgeting cycle or something similar—work to structure the budget around the key components of your strategy. You don’t need to completely rewire your budget, but you do need to create direct linkages between how your resources are allocated and how those efforts support your strategy. Over time, the areas that contribute less directly to strategic goals will become clear, and you can work on gradually aligning everything you fund. But even if your budget only extends through the fiscal year, consider how you’ll align your strategy to projects in the future. For future resource allocation, link your operations (what some refer to as the “work planning process”) to your strategy. Your expectation should be that the process of aligning your resources to your strategy can happen within year two of your strategic planning execution. Step 2: Evaluate your strategy.At this point, your strategy has been launched: Now you need to know whether or not you’re making progress! Here’s how to do that. Create reports to highlight your results.Ten years ago, you may have evaluated your strategy annually. But in today’s business environment, that’s not a feasible option. At a minimum, you should be reporting on your entire strategy on a quarterly basis, or breaking down your strategy into pieces and reporting on one of those pieces each month. The report you use should highlight progress on your measures and projects, and how those link to your objectives. The point is to show how all these elements fit together and relate to the strategic plan as a whole. Hold regular strategy meetings.Report on strategy progress via the quarterly or monthly review meetings you scheduled early in the process. It’s important to note that throwing together an impromptu meeting to go over results isn’t going to get you anywhere. Instead, your strategy review meetings should be meticulously organized and accompanied by an agenda. (See this article for a sample agenda.) Your meetings should revolve around three key issues:
Encourage candid dialogue and make sure the discussion stays focused. Deploy strategy reporting software (if you haven’t already).To make strategy execution work, reporting is unavoidable. While you might be able to track your first strategy meeting in Excel or give your first presentation via PowerPoint, you’ll quickly realize you need some kind of software to track the continuous gathering of data, update your projects, and keep your leadership team on the same page. If you want to learn more about the major areas of responsibility you should be covering in your strategy management process—and how strategy software can help with that—take a look at our ClearPoint tour. Here are two additional helpful pieces of content as you move forward:
Chapter 4: The Benefits Of Strategic Planning (& Challenges You Should Be Aware Of)Done right, strategy planning can benefit your business tremendously, but a certain degree of stick-to-itiveness is required to get the job done. (As we noted at the beginning of this guide, organizations that actually meet their strategic objectives are in the minority. Don’t worry, though, yours can be one of the success stories.) But those that develop a disciplined approach to both planning and execution have been shown to improve performance significantly. Why is strategic planning so effective? Because it fosters healthy organizational practices that drive better outcomes. Engaging in strategic planning will benefit you in multiple ways: 1. You have quality data available to support better decisions.Setting goals and choosing the relevant metrics to track progress toward achieving them means you always have meaningful data to reference. That naturally leads to faster, more efficient decision-making, especially when that data is readily accessible to employees at every level. Timely, valid, and actionable information is especially valuable in situations where organizations need to react quickly, so they can make the best decisions possible for all their stakeholders. 2. You allocate resources more effectively.In Chapter 3, we discussed structuring the budget around the key components of your strategy. Doing so helps ensure resources are allocated correctly, and in a way that aligns with your goals. Tying the budget directly to goals also makes it easy to adjust when necessary, if circumstances change and new goals are prioritized over old. For example, a local government may have had a goal to develop a green infrastructure plan at the beginning of 2020, but then had to pivot with the onset of COVID-19. To support a new goal of developing a COVID-19 response plan, they could simply review the resources used by current projects, evaluate those projects’ priorities and budget needs in comparison to the new goal, and reallocate funds as necessary. 3. You maintain focus.Having a strategic plan brings your main focus points to the forefront, so you don’t have to dig into the details of everything your organization is doing. That means there’s no time wasted analyzing irrelevant and extensive data points in strategic meetings; instead, everyone stays focused on what is most important or where improvements need to be made. 4. You improve communication and build employee engagement.Strategic planning is intended to create a single, focused vision of where an organization is headed. When that shared vision is communicated clearly and consistently, it inspires employees to take ownership over their role in the plan, and they are typically more motivated to do their best work. High engagement will directly impact your organization’s financial health and profitability. 3 Things To Consider Before You Embark On A Strategic PlanHaving helped hundreds of organizations—for-profit, nonprofit, and local governments included—navigate through the strategic planning and implementation process, we’ve seen firsthand the many challenges that arise along the way. There’s no “typical” scenario, but there are some common pitfalls that have the power to make or break your chances of success. Below are three things you should be aware of going into the process. 1. Everything about strategic planning takes time.Don’t expect your plan to materialize after a few meetings. The initial planning activities usually unfold over the space of several months, but strategy execution itself is an ongoing process. Anticipate devoting extensive time and effort in particular to:
2. There is a danger of “analysis paralysis.”Data and analytics are an integral part of strategic planning. And while it may be tempting to use all your available metrics, charts, and graphs for every business decision, doing so unnecessarily can be a detriment to the decision-making process. It’s easy to find yourself drilling deeper into data when perhaps only a high-level view of the information is needed. Avoid squandering time and energy on excessive analysis by making sure the right people are focusing on the right data and actions: Leadership should focus on organization-wide goals and progress. Teams should focus on the individual projects and daily tasks that are helping to accomplish those goals (and the data that goes with them). 3. Having a plan doesn’t mean your organization will execute on it.Good planning is only half the battle; the lion’s share of forward progress is in executing that plan. But the execution stage is where many organizations stumble. They aren’t prepared for the work involved with follow-through, both in terms of the time commitment and the tools necessary to support performance improvement. Strategy consultants are excellent guides for plan creation, but most offer no guidance on how to carry it out; as a result, organizations are left floundering. It’s imperative to have a system in place that will measure and monitor your progress toward goals during the execution phase. Performance management tools like ClearPoint allow organizations to track a variety of metrics related to strategic projects, helping to maintain focus over the long term. And our team of strategy implementation experts is always available to provide guidance on every aspect of execution, from setting up an efficient management process to using our reporting tools optimally. With the right plan in place, tools to support it, and committed leadership, every organization has a good chance of seeing their strategy come to life. You’ve made it through these steps…....but be sure to place a great deal of emphasis on rightsizing this process for your own organization. Did you recently do a SWOT analysis and create new vision and mission statements? Don’t do it again. Do you already manage with a robust set of KPIs? Use them. Do you currently create reports for your board and management team? Modify them or use a strategy evaluation framework to make sure they’re focused and move on. Rather than doing everything, it’s more important to realize there is overlap between these steps. Understand how they all fit into your own strategic planning process, and then move forward with the sections you’re missing. And if you have any questions along the way, get in touch with us. We live and breathe strategic planning and are here to help! Strategic Planning FAQsa What are the key elements of a strategic plan?The best strategic plans have clear goals, key metrics to track the goals, and smart initiatives to help meet these goals. a What are objectives?Objectives are three-to-five year goals of where you want your organization to be. Organizations should have no more than 10 objectives. One example is to improve patient satisfaction. a What are measures?Measures are metrics used to measure if you’re meeting your goal. Organizations should aim for 2-4 measures per objective. If you have a goal to improve patient satisfaction, a measure might be average patient wait time. a What are initiatives?Initiatives are projects designed to help meet your goals. You should have 1-2 initiatives per objective. A simple example is the initiative to transition to digital sign-in before appointments to reduce patient wait time and improve patient satisfaction. a What is a strategy map?A strategy map is a visual tool designed to clearly communicate a strategic plan. It’s important because employees need to understand what they are responsible for and why it’s important to the overall success of the organization. a What is a strategic plan?A strategic plan is your organization’s long-term goals and highlights how you want to grow in specific categories. The strategic plan lists objectives and goals for each area your company would like to grow, and lists initiatives the organization will take to meet their goals. a Why is a strategy important?Without a strategy, your organization is walking blindly with no clear, aligned goals in sight. A strategy gets your team aligned on what your long-term goals as an organization are.
What are some reasons for failure of the marketing plan?There can be multiple internal and external factors behind the failures of marketing plans, but here a few of the common reasons:. Rapid changes. ... . Internal bureaucracy. ... . Unexpected competition. ... . Past success. ... . Unclear communication. ... . Poor product. ... . Selected market segment. ... . Unclear strategy.. Which section of a marketing plan is an at a glance overview for a manager who may not have time to read the entire document?The executive summary is for the people who lack the time and interest to read the entire marketing plan but who need a good basic understanding of what it is about.
When starting a presentation What is the first crucial step to take?The first step in preparing a presentation is to learn more about the audience to whom you'll be speaking. It's a good idea to obtain some information on the backgrounds, values, and interests of your audience so that you understand what the audience members might expect from your presentation.
Why is it necessary to regularly adjust a businesses marketing plan?Either way, a regular update to the marketing plan allows for new analysis informed by new market experience, opportunities to realign plans with other functions, and the chance to inform others within the marketing function so that the team can learn and evolve together.
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