5 questions you should be asking when developing or updating a strategic plan

Although you and your team may have had a 2020 strategic plan in place, January tends to be a time of closing out the previous financial year and settling into the New Year. Hence, February is usually the time when things start to fall into place, and an opportune time to dust off and review the plan that had been developed months ago.

In most organisations, ideally, strategic/work plans for 2020 would have been completed in the latter half of 2019. However, with 2019 over, and year end reports in the process of being finalised, we now have a better picture of our performance at the end of 2019, and whether the plans and strategies we proposed for 2020 are tenable.

To that end, and although it might not be a formal exercise, the review of your 2020 plans and strategies is still advised. It is an opportunity to become reacquainted with their content, and to amend them based on recent developments or recently acquired data that would not have been available when the plans and strategies were initially conceptualised.

However, it must be stated that although the impetus for this discussion is strategic planning in the workplace, it is also important for us to apply a similar rigour to our personal life plans – even if the plan covers just one year. Revisiting our personal plan with helps us keep it top of mind, and is likely to foster greater commitment and ultimately, results.

So whether it is for the workplace or with respect to your personal goals, here are 5 questions you can ask yourself when conducting this review:

1.  Is there new data or developments that need to be considered?

In the workplace, and due to the fact that plans tend to be made well in advance, to some degree, they are conceptualised with incomplete information, or a true reflection of the circumstances that would exist at implementation. Hence assumptions would have been made, which need to be debunked or updated.

Frequently, it is through the plans prepared that the budget requested by your team or department can be justified. However, if the requested budgetary allocation was not granted, or specific initiatives under the plan were not approved, how would the proposed strategy or implementation plan be affected? Also, have recent developments made certain aspects of the plan less relevant, longer appropriate, or in need of realignment? Those are some of the questions that ought to be answered.

2.  Are the goals S.M.A.R.T.?

Ideally, and for each activity, goals or desired outcomes ought to be identified. However, it is crucial – especially in our performance-driven workplace – to ensure that those outcomes are clear and are  “S.M.A.R.T.” (specific, measurable, actionable, reasonable, and timely).

The extent to which goals are vague, or no specific goals have been set, means that you (and/or the team), may not truly know when the desired outcomes have been achieved. Further and in the workplace, having specific and measurable goals are crucial, especially if quantifiable targets have been set, against which you (and/or the team) will be audited.

With regard to personal plans, having S.M.A.R.T. goals should not be underestimated. They can spur motivation and give you focus points for your efforts, thus improving the chances that you will stick to your plan and achieve the desired outcomes.

3. Is it possible identify and manage risks?

We all know the saying, ‘best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry‘. In the spirit of being proactive, it would be beneficial to give some thought to the situations that could arise that could affect the successful implementation of the plan and the desired outcomes being achieved.

Having identified the situations, it would also be useful to evaluate each of those risks and determine whether or not, or the extent to which, they are likely to occur. For those that are highly likely, or even highly possible, it is recommended that thought be given to how they can be minimised, and at what point steps taken to better manage them.

4.  Are the resources available to successfully execute the plan?

As noted in the first point, strategies and plans are usually developed well in advance of their implementation. Hence, the resources that might be needed – which is not limited to budget, but could include manpower, specialist expertise, equipment and third party services, to name a few – ought to be identified, and a determination made whether they will be available at the time of execution.

It also ought to highlighted that we tend to overlook and not fully appreciate all of the inputs that are critical to the successful implementation of an activity. In some instances, the outputs of previous activities are prerequisites; hence a careful examination of the needed inputs for each activity could help to better organise the plan, and identify priority activities.

5.  How easy is it to track the metrics?

Finally, following from the second point, and the need to have measurable goals, this point seeks to emphasise the need to identify metrics through which the goals can not only be measured, but also can be measured easily. Although specifying the ease of measurement might appear superfluous, it is emphasising the need to be able to continually track one’s performance, in order to adjust tactics, or course-correct, as needed.

To that end, the metrics ought to be relevant to the goal, and should provide a reasonable indication how far away you are from the desired outcome. Additionally, consideration ought to be given to how accurate the data collected for those metrics is, and thus the extent to which they can be relied upon when trying to make informed decisions.

Image credit:  Gerd Altmann (Pixabay)

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