Strategic Planning - Closing the Loop

I just read an interesting blog entry on “bringing perpetual reality to strategic planning”. This is EXACTLY what you need in your strategic planning – a process that drives from good strategy and vision to the hard realities of what is going to happen, who will do it, and how much it will cost. Putting real feedback into your planning process helps us to correct, improve and build on what we learn in implementation.

In Simplified Strategic Planning, we drive this approach three distinct ways:

1. The structure of the process flows toward an end-point that makes very specific, measurable objectives and implementation plans.
2. The implementation planning process leads to a regular monitoring process where progress on execution is tracked and discussed.
3. The entire experience is reviewed at the beginning of the subsequent cycles for learning and opportunities for improvement.

Does your strategic planning do these things? If not – let’s talk about how you can improve the “reality connection” in your strategic planning!

Strategic Planning in law firms

I saw a fascinating tidbit in a blog on law firm profitability today...just thought I'd like to share it with you:

http://www.morepartnerincome.net/2007/12/10/law-firms-with-strategic-plans-more-profitable/

One of the most interesting points in the article is that while a huge majority of firms that do strategic planning say it improves their profitability, 74% of law firms don't do strategic planning!

It also refers to an interesting article about why strategic planning is such a problem for law firms, written by a partner in a large firm:

http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/articles.asp?Action=Article&ArticleCategoryID=58&ArticleID=475

Strategic Planning - Why your balanced scorecard doesn't work part 4

Your balanced scorecard isn't driving action.

This is most likely true, if you are doing balanced scorecard instead of true strategic planning in your company. Why do I say this? Because true strategic planning focuses attention on the things that will make a difference for your company. Balanced scorecard processes, on the other hand, tend to rely on employee understanding of the links between metrics and reality - and, because of shortcomings I've discussed in earlier posts, these links rarely motivate employees as well as understanding the underlying issues. Granted, your CFO or other technical managers may quickly grasp the relationships - but true strategic competency requires broad participation and support from all parts of the company.

Even if you have excellent training and support throughout the company for balanced scorecard, you are likely to have issues if you are not also driving execution through a routine tool for monitoring and accountability on actions (rather than numbers). The action plan process in Simplified Strategic Planning is an excellent approach to doing this, and can be helpful even if you are not using an optimal strategic planning process. There are several keys to making implementation work - it is, after all, the sore spot in strategic planning for most companies. The most important of these is to have rock solid and unified support for implementation accountability at the top levels of your company. This is a key area where executives must always act as role models for the rest of the organization - failure to do so almost always results in sloppy execution.

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If you are looking for a strategic planning speaker to help your organization learn better strategic planning implementation - or the whole strategic planning process - please check out my strategic planning speaker brochure or see what past clients have said about me at http://www.strategyspeakers.com/p_rwb.asp