Three Steps to Effective Strategic Planning

Source: The Marc Rosenberg Blog 

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Marc Rosenberg.

Is your firm committed to all three of the main steps of strategic planning? These are: brainstorming the vision, creating goals to achieve the vision, and implementation. If your firm is not committed to all three steps, it's not going to work.

Countless firms produce exquisitely crafted vision statements at their partner retreats. And that's where it stops. Nothing gets accomplished because the firm didn't take the second step: Create a short list of high-impact goals and action steps for each partner to accomplish the vision. 

Can your firm create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bounded) goals? If it's not crystal clear how you will measure the achievement of a goal, then it's unlikely the goal will be achieved. 

Does the firm know its limitations? It's common for firms to create too many goals. Identify a small number of high-impact goals and attack them with a vengeance. 

Do the partners have both the necessary time and support to work on strategic planning goals? What are their average billable hours? If it's too high (say, over 1,400), that tells me that the partners are so busy doing client work that there is no way they will have time to work on strategic planning goals.

If you want to doom a strategic plan, burden busy client service partners with lots of strategic planning goals without giving them support.

Is someone watching? The firm must monitor progress for implementation to succeed. If someone creates a goal on January 1 and no one says a word to this person about their goals until December 31, it is unlikely that the goal will come to fruition. Progress must be monitored by the champion. 

For the complete entry, read “The Strategic Planning Test – Part 2.” 

From The Marc Rosenberg Blog, August 4, 2014, blog.rosenbergassoc.com.