In previous blogs I have outlined what the strategic planning process is and today I want to discuss the heart and starting point of the entire journey to developing your business, the Planning Session.
Magic Wand
One of the simplest tools that can be used in planning and developing your business is the “Magic Wand” process. If you had a Magic Wand with no limitations, what changes would you make to your organisation?
This is the ideal tool to stretch the boundaries in your organisation allowing you to identify changes without considering the cost or how you would make the changes. It is so simple to develop a list of items to focus on for the change process. The dilemma is of course is, which of a potentially long list of issues identified do we fix first? Which are core and which are merely symptoms of underlying problems. This is where the process kicks in to deal with this overwhelm.
Now-Where-How
As a part of the change management process you need to look at where you are now. This allows you to measure improvement and to monitor change. The issues generated by the Magic Wand are our “NOW” position. The temptation is to start fixing all the things you find wrong by jumping straight into the “HOW”. My approach is to avoid this temptation and invest time in conducting the “WHERE” analysis. The question becomes where do we want to be at some future point in time. What is our business vision? What are our objectives? The key is to have a good understanding of where we are heading so that when we do get to the “HOW” we know what is important and what is not.
Strategic SWOT Analysis
The objective of the Strategic SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is the development of strategies. Strategy can be defined as the path the business is going to follow to achieve its objectives. While the development of strategy can be quite complex and difficult to do, I have found the Strategic SWOT analysis to be a useful tool in starting the process.
The process we use is very simple. Develop a handful of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and apply the following questions to develop a first cut strategy:
- How can I use these strengths to commercialise these opportunities?
- How can I use these strengths to overcome these threats?
- What do I do to make sure these weaknesses don’t spoil the opportunities?
- What if weaknesses combine with the threats? Corrective action?
Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Your SCA is an advantage that the your company has relative to your competition. To be really effective the advantage must be:
1. Sustainable
2. Hard to copy
3. Unique
4. Superior to the competition
Determining the SCA for any organisation requires an understanding of the customers needs and preferences. A competitive advantage arises out of activities which provide high value to the customer and a strong ability to beat competitors.
In the planning session you will be asked to brainstorm the factors that influence your customers to buy from you. Then on a rating scale of 1 to 10, you will be required to rate these factors in terms of the Value to the Customer and well as the Ability to Beat Competitors. Examples of SCA include factors such as quickest turnaround time, high product quality, low cost production, brand strength and reputation. By completing this exercise we can have a true assessment of where our competitive strength lies.
Issue Ranking
The final exercise for the planning day involves us using the SCA to prioritise some of the key issues applicable to the business from the initial Magic Wand list. This exercise ultimately allows to identify the most important issues that the project team should work on. The beauty of this process is that sets the business up for the short term to work on instant improvement in areas identified as needing work. Concurrently, we have collected the basics to put together the longer term strategic plan.
The issues will also be sorted into the five strategic areas being Marketing, Operations, Human Resources, Finance and Innovation. We therefore have the makings of our entire business strategy!
Next Steps
As stated above, at the completion of our planning session we have an action plan to begin working immediately on the most pressing issues within the business. With our work together we can start making improvements form day one. And the most exciting part is that we have the outline for our one page business plan and/or our longer form strategic plan. It really is such a valuable process.
