Examining the current state of your business may lead you to the conclusion that your business may not achieve the goals you have put in place to get you to the next level. This occurs in both new and existing businesses, including:

• An existing business whose growth has stalled in current markets.
• An existing business that wishes to expand into new markets.
• A new business that must re-prioritize the efforts of its finite resources to achieve its committed goals.

Developing and executing on a Strategic Management Plan can help you overcome these business challenges.

Strategic Management is the continuous planning, monitoring, analysis, and assessment of all that is necessary for an organization to meet its goals and objectives. The strategic management process helps company leaders assess their company’s present situation, define strategic goals, deploy corresponding programs, and continuously analyze the effectiveness and impact on the bottom line. This is an effort to assure the achievement of your strategic goals.

A Strategic Management Plan is a management framework to focus your limited resources where it matters, with projects/activities that are achievable within a short period of time that can impact longer term strategic goals, and monitoring to measure progress in key areas at frequent intervals in order to adjust projects/activities as needed. It consists of three parts: Strategic goals, key performance indicators, and supporting projects/activities.

Creating the Strategic Management Plan

• Identify and define your strategic goals. Keep them simply stated, so everyone understands them. The strategic goals should be measurable and achievable, and offer everyone a part in advancing it. Keep the list of strategic goals to the critical few, such as 3.
• Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will provide a way to measure progress for each of your strategic goals. Setup the monitoring and reporting to review regularly for assessment. Show multi-year, historical trend lines on the KPIs.
• Identify and define projects and activities that support the strategic goals. Maintain a list indicating which of the strategic goals each of the projects/activities supports. Could be one or more strategic goals. If an interesting project does not support at least one of the strategic goals, then it may need to be deemed a low priority.

Reviewing the Strategic Management Plan

Review the strategic management plan frequently, such as once or twice per month:

• Review the KPIs – is measurable progress being made on the strategic goals? If not, do the supporting projects/activities need to be modified? New projects/activities added?
• Review the projects/activities – which have been completed? Are they being completed on time? Are they too ambitious (unachievable) with current resource levels? Or not ambitious enough? Make adjustments as required, to improve the ability to move the dial on the key performance indicators.