Strategic Planning

 

Strategic planning is an organisation's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.

 

Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats),

PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and

EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).

 

Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organisation's future course.

 

All strategic planning deals with at least one of following key questions:

 

"What do we do?"

"For whom do we do it?"

"How do we excel?"

“How do we execute?”

“How do we differentiate?”

 

In business strategic planning, some authors phrase the third question as "How can we beat or avoid competition?".

But this approach is more about defeating competitors than about excelling.

 

In many organisations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organisation is going over the next year or - more typically - 3 to 5 years (long term), although some extend their vision to 20 years.

 

In order to determine where it is going, the organisation needs to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there.

The resulting document is called the "strategic plan."

 

It is also true that strategic planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan your organisational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organisation to survive the turbulent business climate.

 

Core to Strategic Planning is of course People. If a Strategic plan is to possess a genuine chance of success, an integrated People plan is an essential component. And yet, with all of the time and money spent on strategic planning, often there is a lag in putting the plans into action or the execution fails to achieve the desired results.

 

All managers know that execution is critical to the success of the strategic plan. Yet making the plan work is an even bigger challenge than creating the plan, in large part because execution requires a disciplined process or a logical set of connected activities that enables the organisation to successfully integrate the strategies into the operation. Many factors inhibit the successful execution of the strategic plan, and ALL of them are tied to the people of the organisation.

 

Below is a short list of factors that inhibit successful strategy execution:

 

• The culture of the organisation does not support the challenges presented by the plan (includes organisational politics and structure)

 

• Incentives programs that reward people for seniority rather than results

 

• Departmental and divisional silos in the organisation that inhibit the sharing of information and teamwork

 

• Resistance to change

 

• The vision for the plan’s impact on the future of the organisation is not clearly articulated

 

• Failure to clearly describe the employees’ role in the implementation of the plan

 

• Employees implementing the plan are lacking the tools, knowledge and skills

 

• Failure to hold people accountable for their part in successfully implementing the plan

 

• Execution takes longer than planning and managers, caught up in the daily challenges of running their operations, may lose focus and/or interest

 

At Phoenix Management we take a different approach to People Strategies.

As with all our projects we provide custom solutions for business innovation, adaptability, resiliency, performance, and growth.

 

We work with key players from all levels of your organisation to ensure that the results achieved improve productivity, efficiency, and profitability for the organisation. Because we understand that your situation, challenges, and goals are unique to your organisational culture, we tailor our approach and tools to provide solutions that meet your specific needs.

 

Working together, we help you achieve on-target performance with measurable results, and guide you in becoming a sustainable hospitality organisation.