Commitment to achieving strategic goals is still not enough—you also need execution. Successful execution means having the discipline necessary to achieve your goals and make sustainable behavioral change.
To sustain the effort, employees should understand and be kept apprised of how their daily activities are helping achieve the desired outcomes. That means looking at both intended and unintended effects. Identifying and documenting key assumptions about the plan is essential.
Periodically, challenge your assumptions. Recognize small wins, reward your people and reinforce the positive results your strategic initiatives have produced. Doing so will go a long way to taking strategy and change from just what you do to being who you are. Skip to content. The strategic planning process, especially during volatile times, should eliminate everything that isn't necessary and sufficient to communicate an effective strategy.
But the focus for functional leaders is still to identify initiatives that will drive enterprise growth ambitions — and determine how to unlock the capacity time, budget, talent and technology needed to execute those initiatives. These nine steps provide a guide by which functional leaders can ensure a rigorous approach to strategic planning in a way that effectively prioritizes the successful execution of critical initiatives, whether functional strategic planning takes place on a calendar basis or is more of an adaptive strategy , involving an ongoing reassessment of priorities.
This includes your mindset on cost management and budgeting. All too often, concerns about meeting short-term targets, fear of failure and a preoccupation with operational issues overwhelm aspiration. Commit to a strategic approach to cost management and budgeting, wherever and whenever you decide which initiatives to pursue and fund. At the outset, clearly define the enterprise and business context for all stakeholders to prevent managers and executives from misunderstanding one another and derailing the process.
Outline the responsibilities, process timelines and expected outcomes for each participant, especially in cases where the planning and budgeting processes cross functions. Interview business leaders and have them describe the current and desired future state of the business, lay out the goals and capabilities required to support and enable those business aspirations, and specify suitable metrics to gauge progress against those goals.
Evaluate the maturity and importance of key functional capabilities required to support the overall business goals. Generate a prioritized list of functional capabilities to bolster or gaps to fill to support business goals. Develop a prioritized list of objectives with discrete and measurable steps that describe how a specific goal will be accomplished. Each strategic business goal can be supported by a few objectives with a time horizon of one to two years.
Objectives should be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and tied to a near-term deadline to ensure timely completion. Develop an action plan that stipulates how the objectives will be met, including specific measures to track progress, and metrics that are robust but simple enough to quantify that progress effectively.
Strategic growth objectives should be ambitious by definition, but they still have to be funded — with budget, talent and technology. The challenge is how to allocate scarce resources to the most critical initiatives and growth investments.
Start with a rigorous view of your baseline budget — the resources required to conduct all ongoing functional activities. Then develop a sound plan, anchored in strategic objectives, of the trade-offs your function can make to keep resources moving toward key initiatives. Be sure to deprioritize funding for less strategically relevant initiatives, and look to better leverage underutilized resources.
And, make sure you have a clear understanding of the relative cost, risk, time and benefits of potential cost optimization initiatives.
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