So much of institutional success feels dependent on forecasting the future. You need to know where you’re going and what’s coming down the road in the opposite direction that might pose an obstacle to you getting where you want to go. Sometimes, this feels like an exercise in magical thinking, like if you only had a crystal ball, you’d be alright. But it doesn’t take a crystal ball. It takes a plan.

Strategic planning involves long-term thinking for organizations, determining the primary goals for the business over the next year or several years. In that regard, it needs to be both aspirational (looking ahead to what to where the organization needs to be) and actionable (providing a road map for the route to the organization’s next destinations).

How do you design and implement a strategic plan that is both visionary and practicable? Here are the basics:

I. Build a Robust Planning Team

As is usually the case with any large-scale, interdisciplinary endeavor, the first order of business is to get the right folks on board. This is obviously fairly specific to your organization and your goals. For example, the team for a municipal strategic plan might include city planners, transit and transportation authorities, citizen representatives, local legislators, business owners, developers, conservationists, and preservationists. Meanwhile, a strategic planning team for a university might include administration, faculty, student, parent, and alumni representatives, facilities, athletics, accounting, marketing, community relations, and other administrative staff.

The key is to build a team with the necessary scope of interest and expertise to understand your organization’s current needs, challenges, and opportunities to lay out a broad vision for its future. In some instances, it often makes sense to engage a third party to help with planning. A  strategic planning consultant or an expert in city, financial, fundraising, or other types of planning may be a good move for your organization.

II. Assess Current State of Affairs and Articulate Mission

Determining how a business currently functions is the best way to start the strategic planning process, including every aspect of the business in the analysis. Typically, a strategic plan is comprehensive, covering the needs and goals of the entire organization. However, in larger enterprises, a segment-specific strategic plan might be appropriate. (For instance, Momentum provided facilitation and strategic consultation to a large state university system surrounding the development and implementation of a system-wide virtual university. A subset of this work was a Strategic Marketing and Public Relations Plan.)

To understand the current state of affairs, the strategic planning team must have access to reliable data. When we work with a client to develop a strategic plan, we begin by developing an assessment plan and template that guides a collaborative evaluation process. The planning team gathers qualitative and quantitative data to develop a baseline assessment through various tools — ranging from technology assessments and surveys to interviews, focus groups, job shadowing, and perception testing.

Using that assessment, the planning team articulates a vision statement — a simple declaration of the overarching goal and underlying values that will inform the planning process. Having this vision statement to refer to throughout the process helps keep the team on a straight road to a successful plan whenever questions or challenges arise. By clearly defining the organization’s purpose, a business can more easily set goals and objectives to fulfill that purpose.

III. Emphasize Goals, Objectives, and Strategies

The next phase of the process is to clarify goals, objectives, and strategies to work toward those goals in a meaningful manner. This also allows businesses to define timeframes for implementation and ensure the organization’s resources are being used to benefit the company in the long run.

With clearly defined goals, the planning team can establish a base level of understanding. Instead of nebulous ideas and ill-defined goals, the team can work with concrete objectives that are easy to quantify and understand. Often, this is a good place to involve an external facilitator. Among the tools a facilitator might employ is a business case management strategy. A business case is designed to help you make an informed decision and justify why you are spending time, manpower, and money on something. Organizations can use this tool to evaluate costs and benefits associated with a project. When using a business case, the planning team articulates the problem or strategic goal, explores solutions, and narrows the solutions down to a single approach.

The business case lays out all of the options before reaching a conclusion: This is the one you recommend, and this is why. Here are the benefits, and this is what it will cost you. A good business case also lays out how to measure success when the project is done.

The end goal is to make an informed decision. You want to make sure you can justify that you solved the problem and spent your resources in the best way possible. Several techniques can be used to prepare the business case, including:

• SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
• Gap analysis (current state of affairs vs. desired future state)
• Root cause analysis (evaluating why the problem exists)
• Risk analysis (if you don’t manage the problem, what might happen?).

IV. Draft and Approve Strategic Plan

This is the final goal-setting part of the process, where the vision of the business is clarified, especially considering information brought up by the assessment and business case steps. The final strategic plan includes areas to be addressed along with recommended solutions. A quantifiable and realistic plan is set up using the information gathered from the assessment and planning sessions. The plan should define a strategy or direction for the organization and ensure every business unit contributes to that strategy.

The purpose, the organization’s age, and the business market all play a role in the extent and content of the plan. Regardless of these factors, the plan needs to be coherent, consensus-based, and well-communicated to all the constituents in the organization. Your strategic planning process should include an intentional roll-out of the plan to all stakeholders. And its goals need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound) for them to be meaningful.

V. Implement and Monitor Progress

Once the plan is approved, it’s go time. Your plan will have articulated a particular course of action; regular assessments will help you analyze how well your organization follows that course of action. These assessments offer real-time capture of ROI and progress. They also serve an organizational change management function: celebrating success while providing a learning opportunity to apply to future strategic revisions.

Regular progress monitoring may also provide a basis for performance assessment, which can help motivate employees toward increased productivity. The strategic planning process considers everyone’s opinions when defining the status and goals of an organization. When it is finished, it results in defined goals for everyone involved. These two factors boost employee satisfaction immensely, increasing the employees’ sense of agency and collaboration.

If you need assistance drafting a strategic plan that addresses a particular challenge or challenges in your enterprise, drop us a line. We’re ready to help you cultivate a visionary strategic plan to help guide your enterprise to process improvement, growth, and transformation.