Organizations to advance in their field will often craft a strategic plan to guide them. The strategic plan will have the company’s vision for the future and steps the organization will have to take to attain the vision. Sadly, these strategic plans crumble as soon as they are launched and executive teams cannot figure out why this happens. Instead, they go on with more strategic planning hoping that it will yield results, which it doesn’t. If this is the tale in your organization, here are some critical factors that will guide you in successfully implementing your strategic plan:
Engagement
In many companies, senior management takes the task of strategic planning. They go about it without involving the staff at other levels. This is wrong because eventually, they will not be responsible for executing the strategy, the team will.
One key element in strategic planning is to engage staff of all levels across the organization. Through staff engagement, you will acquire additional input, and they will become even more committed to the end plan. Furthermore, employees will bring into light opportunities, challenges, issues and concerns which the senior management may not be aware of. Engage the staff in strategic planning, and you will achieve their “buy-in” in executing the strategies.
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The Strategic Planning process is successful when there is top down and bottom up communication. It often starts with the message being passed to all levels of staff that there will be a Strategic Planning process. The bottom-up communication involves the faculty participating in the process. Then there is top-down communication with senior management sharing the strategic plan with the staff.
Innovation
Many organizations encourage their employees to embrace innovation. They go ahead to come up with strategies that will device new services or products. However, they fail in devising strategy for Innovation. Such strategy should foster a reshaping of the organization’s culture to support innovation. If your organization is to be innovative, it should have a policy in place for innovation.
Project management
Once you come up with a strategic plan, there are two critical roles in project management. One is identifying the projects that will see the successful execution of the strategy. The other part is prioritizing these projects so that the high priority projects have enough resources. For all this to be successful, the employees should be involved as this will ensure they are committed.
Culture
Change has to be ingrained in the organization’s culture if the strategic plan is to be successful. If the employees are opposed to change and believe in aggression from above, the strategic plan might not be successfully implemented. On the other hand, if the staff feels that change is essential and that they are responsible for its enactment, execution will be successful.
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