Set yourself up for success, stay focused, and communicate well in order to sustain momentum in strategic plan implementation.
You’ve done the work of planning and preparing a strategic plan for your company. It’s been collaborated on, poured over, refined, edited, proofed, and published to your employees. You feel proud of what you’ve accomplished and excited for the implementation – and then immediately after it’s announced that nice, shiny strategic plan sits on a shelf and gathers dust. What happened?
The short answer is that your strategic plan needed a strategy of its own for implementation. In terms of what’s needed for success, it’s not unlike any client project your firm would take on: you need to have the right team, monitor progress, validate priorities, and communicate milestones and other successes.
Align it with your business plan. Once a strategic plan is developed, there is often an annual budgeting or business plan process. To ensure you don’t lose momentum on the vision you just set, it’s important to make sure you align your annual budget and resources for your long-term investments. Sometimes the first year or two of a strategic plan doesn’t have an ROI – does your annual business plan have the space for those investments? Also, are you staying focused by keeping your teams aligned around your strategic plan projects, or are you experiencing unintentional scope creep by taking on other initiatives that might end up competing?
Identify and track project leads and teams. While being careful not to take critical time away from other projects, lean on your experienced and knowledgeable employees to serve in varying roles in implementing the strategic plan. Fairly senior people have management experience and can serve as project leads or point people, but teams can and should be diverse, including those with strong administrative skills. It can also present growth opportunities, learning experience, and great exposure for those who participate and succeed in their roles – something that can be looked at for future or succession planning. Support from your board of directors and executive or senior leadership team is also an important step to benefit from their experience or lessons learned.
How to measure success A very useful approach is to appoint a project management office, or PMO, that will oversee the execution of your strategic plan. From overseeing scope, schedule, and budget, as well as approving project leaders and teams, a PMO can help ensure successful collaboration, communication, and implementation of the plan. A PMO can have a dedicated leader responsible for capturing progress, understanding risks and issues, and acting as an accountability partner to ensure that the plan is not getting dusty. Be sure to establish mechanisms for tracking and measuring success, especially a method in your financial system or enterprise resource planning tool. This is a streamlined way to capture time and expenses in one place for ease of analytics and insights. In addition, using well-organized progress trackers can keep people focused on their goals and milestones. You can also drive accountability by having individual project leaders set annual priorities and milestones that they will report on in a consistent rhythm, such as quarterly.
Manage progress and address issues. Keep in mind that even though it’s often called a strategic “plan,” it might be a more fluid process than a rigid checklist – perhaps more like a strategic direction. Aspects can change and priorities can shift as the plan progresses over time, so like most situations, be prepared to pivot when challenges or barriers present themselves. Maybe the right candidate for a new position is proving elusive and that goal needs to shift to the next quarter; maybe a dramatic change in market forces or the economy will require the whole plan to be revalidated. This is where it’s crucial to have support for your internal staff who are working on the implementation team and need clarity.
Communicate progress. You should regularly communicate and celebrate the milestones of your plan, but there can be a lot of information to share. When in doubt, stick to the basics: core metrics, actions, and results. Provide enough details so that people have confidence that progress is being made, but be careful of creating too much noise, and remember that what that looks like is different for every company. In addition, if you’re not regularly communicating core business information, a strategic plan can be a good way to start, especially if you’ve aligned it with your annual business plan.
Have fun while you’re at it. Give your plan a theme. It might feel like business as usual for those managing the implementation behind the scenes, but overall, it is a different initiative with its own goals and milestones – so it should feel different. A theme can serve as an overarching vision for a plan and as an engaging, creative way to communicate and celebrate progress.
Like any project, implementation – not just organization – can make your strategic plan a success. Set yourself up, stay focused, and communicate well, and instead of gathering dust, that shiny new plan will end up well-worn and dog-eared from constant use.
Ashley Heinnickel is the chief marketing officer for LDG and has led the project management office for multiple strategic plans throughout her career. Connect with her on LinkedIn.