Follow these 6 steps to successfully implement your strategic plan.
What is strategic implementation?
Getting your strategy ready for implementation
Avoiding the implementation pitfalls
Covering all your bases
Make sure you have the support
Determine your plan of attack
What is Strategic Implementation?
Implementation is the process that turns strategies and plans into actions in order to accomplish strategic objectives and goals. Implementing your strategic plan is as important, or even more important, than your strategy. The video How to Build a Strategic Plan You Can Actually Implement is a great way to learn how to take your implementation to the next level.
Critical actions move a strategic plan from a document that sits on the shelf to actions that drive business growth. Sadly, the majority of companies who have strategic plans fail to implement them. According to Fortune Magazine, nine out of ten organizations fail to implement their strategic plan for many reasons:
60% of organizations don’t link strategy to budgeting
75% of organizations don’t link employee incentives to strategy
86% of business owners and managers spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy
95% of the typical workforce doesn’t understand their organization’s strategy.
A strategic plan provides a business with the roadmap it needs to pursue a specific strategic direction and set of performance goals, deliver customer value, and be successful. However, this is just a plan; it doesn’t guarantee that the desired performance is reached any more than having a roadmap guarantees the traveler arrives at the desired destination.
Getting Your Strategy Ready for Implementation
For those businesses that have a plan in place, wasting time and energy on the planning process and then not implementing the plan is very discouraging. Although the topic of implementation may not be the most exciting thing to talk about, it’s a fundamental business practice that’s critical for any strategy to take hold.
The strategic plan addresses the what and why of activities, but implementation addresses the who, where, when, and how. The fact is that both pieces are critical to success. In fact, companies can gain competitive advantage through implementation if done effectively. In the following sections, you’ll discover how to get support for your complete implementation plan and how to avoid some common mistakes.
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Because you want your plan to succeed, heed the advice here and stay away from the pitfalls of implementing your strategic plan. Here are the most common reasons strategic plans fail:
Lack of ownership: The most common reason a plan fails is lack of ownership. If people don’t have a stake and responsibility in the plan, it’ll be business as usual for all but a frustrated few.
Lack of communication: The plan doesn’t get communicated to employees, and they don’t understand how they contribute.
Getting mired in the day-to-day: Owners and managers, consumed by daily operating problems, lose sight of long-term goals.
Out of the ordinary: The plan is treated as something separate and removed from the management process.
An overwhelming plan: The goals and actions generated in the strategic planning session are too numerous because the team failed to make tough choices to eliminate non-critical actions. Employees don’t know where to begin.
A meaningless plan: The vision, mission, and value statements are viewed as fluff and not supported by actions or don’t have employee buy-in.
Annual strategy: Strategy is only discussed at yearly weekend retreats.
Not considering implementation: Implementation isn’t discussed in the strategic planning process. The planning document is seen as an end in itself.
No progress report: There’s no method to track progress, and the plan only measures what’s easy, not what’s important. No one feels any forward momentum.
No accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source, and initiative must have an owner.
Lack of empowerment: Although accountability may provide strong motivation for improving performance, employees must also have the authority, responsibility, and tools necessary to impact relevant measures. Otherwise, they may resist involvement and ownership.
It’s easier to avoid pitfalls when they’re clearly identified. Now that you know what they are, you’re more likely to jump right over them!
Covering All Your Bases
As a business owner, executive, or department manager, your job entails making sure you’re set up for a successful implementation. Before you start this process, evaluate your strategic plan and how you may implement it by answering a few questions to keep yourself in check.
Take a moment to honestly answer the following questions:
How committed are you to implementing the plan to move your company forward?
How do you plan to communicate the plan throughout the company?
Are there sufficient people who have a buy-in to drive the plan forward?
How are you going to motivate your people?
Have you identified internal processes that are key to driving the plan forward?
Are you going to commit money, resources, and time to support the plan?
What are the roadblocks to implementing and supporting the plan?
How will you take available resources and achieve maximum results with them?
Making Sure You Have the Support
Often overlooked are the five key components necessary to support implementation: people, resources, structure, systems, and culture. All components must be in place in order to move from creating the plan to activating the plan.
People
The first stage of implementing your plan is to make sure to have the right people on board. The right people include those folks with required competencies and skills that are needed to support the plan. In the months following the planning process, expand employee skills through training, recruitment, or new hires to include new competencies required by the strategic plan.
Resources
You need to have sufficient funds and enough time to support implementation. Often, true costs are underestimated or not identified. True costs can include a realistic time commitment from staff to achieve a goal, a clear identification of expenses associated with a tactic, or unexpected cost overruns by a vendor. Additionally, employees must have enough time to implement what may be additional activities that they aren’t currently performing.
Structure
Set your structure of management and appropriate lines of authority, and have clear, open lines of communication with your employees. A plan owner and regular strategy meetings are the two easiest ways to put a structure in place. Meetings to review the progress should be scheduled monthly or quarterly, depending on the level of activity and time frame of the plan.
Systems
Both management and technology systems help track the progress of the plan and make it faster to adapt to changes. As part of the system, build milestones into the plan that must be achieved within a specific time frame. A scorecard is one tool used by many organizations that incorporates progress tracking and milestones.
Culture
Create an environment that connects employees to the organization’s mission and that makes them feel comfortable. To reinforce the importance of focusing on strategy and vision, reward success. Develop some creative positive and negative consequences for achieving or not achieving the strategy. The rewards may be big or small, as long as they lift the strategy above the day-to-day so people make it a priority.
Determine Your Plan of Attack
Implementing your plan includes several different pieces and can sometimes feel like it needs another plan of its own. But you don’t need to go to that extent. Use the steps below as your base implementation plan. Modify it to make it your own timeline and fit your organization’s culture and structure.
Finalize your strategic plan after obtaining input from all invested parties.
Align your budget to annual goals based on your financial assessment.
Produce the various versions of your plan for each group.
Establish your scorecard system for tracking and monitoring your plan.
Establish your performance management and reward system.
Roll out your plan to the whole organization.
Build all department annual plans around the corporate plan.
Set up monthly strategy meetings with established reporting to monitor your progress.
Set up annual strategic review dates, including new assessments and a large group meeting for an annual plan review.
Resources include such things as labor, real estate, machinery, tools and equipment, technology, and natural resources, as well as financial resources, such as money.
When a company sets its vision and goal, resource allocation plays a vital role. Proper allocation of resources can help to achieve and fulfill project needs. So ultimately vision and strategic goals can be done effectively by eliminating existing risks.
A strategic resource is an asset that is valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and nonsubstitutable (Barney, 1991; Chi, 1994). A resource is valuable to the extent that it helps a firm create strategies that capitalize on opportunities and ward off threats.
Strategic resources are those that give your business an advantage and are difficult to imitate, according to Open Textbooks . Three standard company resources that combine to create competitive advantage are a company's financial strength, its enterprise knowledge and its workforce.
As such, strategic resources could include the financial resources available to the business, the human capital that the business possesses, the network of the business in terms of its physical presence and reach in different corners of the globe, and the existence of effective supply and distribution facilities.
To successful implement strategies organizations need also resources both human resources and financial resources. Strategy implementation involves organization of the firm's resources and motivation of the staff to achieve objectives.
Project resources are components that are necessary for successful project implementation. They include people, equipment, money, time, knowledge – basically, anything that you may require from the project planning to the project delivery phases.
Often overlooked are the five key components necessary to support implementation: people, resources, structure, systems, and culture. All components must be in place in order to move from creating the plan to activating the plan.
The stages described in the guide include: 1) exploration, 2) installation, 3) initial implementation, 4) full implementation, and 5) expansion and scale-up.
Food, water, clothing, sleep, and shelter are the bare necessities for anyone's survival. For many people, these basic needs can not be met without the aid of charitable organizations.
The factors of production are resources that are the building blocks of the economy; they are what people use to produce goods and services. Economists divide the factors of production into four categories: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.
Every technological system makes use of seven types of resources: people, information, materials, tools and machines, energy, capital and time. Since there is limited amount of certain resources on the earth, we must use these resources wisely.
Resources are usually classified into three types, viz. natural, human made and human resources. Natural Resource: Resources which are obtained from nature are called natural resources. Some of the natural resources can be used directly, while for using some others we need the help of some technologies.
In short, raw material extraction and processing always impact on the environment, resulting as they do in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and global warming exacerbation.
Employ a team of highly skilled and experienced professionals to tackle individual supporting projects. Improve internal communication to ensure all team members have the support and knowledge they need. Develop procedures or policies which help teams better achieve their goals.
These can be people, capital, materials, time, and tools. In other words, you cannot start any project without resources. However, different projects require different resources. As a project manager, you have to find the resources that match your project needs and allocate them properly.
The most important resource to a project is its people—the project team. Projects require specific expertise at specific moments in the schedule, depending on the milestones being delivered or the given phase of the project.
There are three main methods used: phased implementation, direct changeover and parallel running. Phased implementation: A staged method whereby one part of the overall system that needs changing is changed. If any problems arise, they are limited in scope and therefore non-critical.
The Implementation Methodology is broken into five stages: Prepare, Plan, Design, Validate, and Deploy. Each stage includes a series of segments that are filled with a set of inputs, tools, techniques, and deliverables all building upon one another to move to the next stage.
The Stages of Implementation Completion (SIC) is an eight-stage tool of implementation process and milestones, with stages spanning three implementation phases (pre-implementation, implementation, sustainability).
The implementation checklist is a tool that can help you plan your implementation. What is it? When you have tried and tested your change idea in a variety of conditions and are sure your change idea results in improvement you are ready to implement or make it 'business as usual'.
A thorough implementation plan usually covers at least five elements: The work plan, resources and budget, stakeholders, risk assessment, and quality control.
Framework was defined as a graphical or narrative representation of the key factors, concepts, or variables to explain the phenomenon of implementation [27-30], and as a minimum needed to include the steps or strategies for implementation.
But there are five underlying themes, which we have named the 'Five Cs' – Carbon, (Natural) Capital, Community, Communication and Cooperation – that I believe all businesses should consider incorporating into their future plans.
Vision statement. The vision statement is an important part of a strategic plan as it provides a short summary highlighting what your business will look like in the future. ...
There are two types of resource plans. One is hypothetical, based on resource type set without any resource constraints. Resource type refers to the skill set that a task requires for completion. The other is an actual resource plan, based on actual resource availability.
Full Transcript. The factors of production are resources that are the building blocks of the economy; they are what people use to produce goods and services. Economists divide the factors of production into four categories: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.
Introduction: My name is Eusebia Nader, I am a encouraging, brainy, lively, nice, famous, healthy, clever person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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