The Strategic Plan: A Key Element of Good Planning

Rapid market evolution and ever-growing consumer expectations: the competitive environment for businesses is increasingly complex. To better adapt, your organization needs efficient management tools. A strategic plan allows you to face these new challenges. It defines your company’s objectives and gathers the different levers to achieve them. Establishing a strategic plan helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses, set priorities, and measure your progress. Investing in this management tool strengthens your ability to make informed decisions, optimize resources, seize opportunities, and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Discover what you need to know about the strategic plan with ACM Canada, a business management consultancy.

What is a Strategic Plan?

As its name suggests, a strategic plan is a planning tool. Good planning is inseparable from smoothly running a company’s or organization’s activities, regardless of size, sector, or purpose.

For example, are you running a tech startup or a company that develops products or services for professionals or the general public? Without formal planning, your organization could invest in projects that don’t align with its overall vision, wasting resources and straying from profitability. With well-thought-out planning, your company can identify its target market, develop appropriate products, attract investors, and position itself well in its sector.

A strategic plan for an organization like yours combines several concepts:

• A tool that indicates the path to your organization’s goals

A strategic plan is an essential management tool for any organization that wishes to thrive and stand out. This guide details your company’s path to achieving its medium—or long-term objectives. It results from a strategic planning process involving an in-depth analysis of your company’s current situation and identifying specific actions needed to reach its future goals.

• A vision for your activity over 10 years

In your strategic plan, you can define a clear vision for your organization over three to five years or even a decade. This long-term planning serves as a basis for establishing dynamic ambitions over shorter periods, such as quarterly, semi-annually, or annually, depending on your business growth rate. If your organization evolves rapidly, you can also revise your strategic plan over shorter periods, such as every two to three years, to adapt to new priorities.

• A detailed plan helps you make appropriate decisions

The primary purpose of your strategic plan is to bridge the gap between your company’s current context and future ambitions. It provides a clear roadmap, guides decision-making, and promotes cohesion and efficiency within your organization. Developing a strategic plan is crucial as it identifies the most critical projects for an organization to focus on.

• A unifying instrument for your activity’s stakeholders

Creating a strategic plan is essential as it promotes better communication and reflects team and stakeholder cohesion around a shared vision. This instrument helps to handle unforeseen events and market changes better. By defining a clear vision of the company’s goals and optimizing resource allocation, the strategic plan contributes to sustainable growth.

How to Develop a Strategic Plan?

Initiating and developing a strategic plan isn’t solely the responsibility of an organization’s business leader or main decision-maker. Instead, critical actors in the structure must fully contribute to ensure the roadmap’s successful creation.

The foundation of a strategic plan necessarily relies on an interview or discussion group among company members to collectively define its vision, mission, and values. The collaboration of vital organizational players in this process is crucial to mobilize and unite each participant around a shared vision. After in-depth analysis, it’s also possible to individually gather each person’s or entity’s perceptions to identify common ideas about the vision, values, and mission.

This first step is essential before the actual development of the strategic plan. It aims to define clear statements that will serve as the foundation for your strategic plan. The vision statement is a comprehensive description of your strategy and summarizes your company’s aspirations for the future. It must be clear and inspiring and guide all strategic decisions.

Critical Elements of a Strategic Plan

Besides the crucial phase of defining your missions and vision, several vital elements mark a good strategic planning process:

• Analyzing your organization’s current situation, including an examination of its external and internal environment

Various techniques can conduct a comprehensive assessment of an organization’s internal and external context at a given time:

• The PESTEL analysis diagram: This identifies external or macroeconomic factors that can influence your organization, including political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal domains.

• Porter’s Five Forces: This tool analyzes your competitive environment and your industry’s attractiveness and profitability by examining different factors. The five forces are:
  • Rivalry among existing competitors (market competition intensity)
  • The threat of new entrants (ease of market entry)
  • Bargaining power of suppliers (suppliers’ ability to influence prices)
  • Bargaining power of customers (customers’ ability to influence prices)
  • Threat of substitute products (availability of product alternatives)
• The 7-S Framework, an instrument studying your organization according to seven key elements: Skills, Style, Strategy, Staff, Structure, Systems, and Shared Values. This organizational model was developed by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, consultants at McKinsey & Company.
• SWOT Analysis: This is the most commonly used tool to identify an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This analysis (developed by Albert Humphrey in the 1960s and 1970s) is conducted internally and externally, providing an overview of the current situation and identifying development levers for your organization.

• Determining your long-term goals and reflecting on strategies and actions to implement

Strategic goals are the cornerstone of the plan. They must directly stem from the long-term vision and define key outcomes to transform the vision into reality.

Long-term goals explain how your company will bridge the gap between its current situation and the envisioned future. You can describe the main directions of future actions, strategic priorities, and necessary measures for each ambition. This section may also include financial projections detailing investments needed to achieve strategic goals.

• Implementation and monitoring: the action plan and tracking indicators

Long-term goals, though essential, remain abstract without a precise action plan. Your action plan can be presented as a table detailing responsibilities, timelines, and key performance indicators for each measure implemented in your strategic plan. This breakdown turns long-term goals into annual objectives and then into concrete tasks and initiatives involving relevant actors within your organization.

If necessary, regular follow-ups, progress evaluations, obstacle identification, and strategic plan adjustments are crucial. Project management tools like Asana or Trello (to name a few) can help monitor and implement your strategic plan effectively.

Your plan should be concrete and dynamic, evolving with internal and external changes. Several indicators can confirm your plan’s effectiveness. By comparing sales performance, financial indicators allow you to track revenue trends and identify positive or negative patterns. Customer satisfaction indicators measure client feedback and identify areas for strategy improvement.

Each step is crucial for a well-thought-out strategic plan that meets an organization’s actual needs based on its situation and market evolution.

How to Communicate a Strategic Plan?

Effective communication of a strategic plan ensures its success. Clearly conveying your organization’s vision with its goals and actions to all stakeholders, whether they are employees, executives, partners, or investors, is necessary.

To this end, avoiding technical jargon is essential. The most effective approach to sharing your strategic plan is to use simple, understandable language. When possible, illustrate your plan with concrete examples to make it more engaging and easier to grasp.

Choosing the right communication channel is also crucial. Team meetings are always beneficial for presenting the strategic plan details to company members. Internal channels like an intranet or internal paper document can also be considered.

Personalizing the strategic plan communication can further engage recipients. For instance, it can be more effective to highlight career opportunities and the individual impact on the strategic plan’s success for employees while emphasizing possible synergies and collaborations for partners.

Why Create a Strategic Plan?

Multiple reasons motivate an organization to develop a strategic plan. By clearly defining goals and priorities, this approach aligns the company’s resources toward a shared vision. This leads to better operational efficiency, as most organizational forces focus on the same ambition. The strategic plan also serves as a reference framework for making quick, informed decisions aligned with strategic objectives.

An organization that leverages a strategic plan is also assured of sustaining its activities. By identifying opportunities and threats, the strategic plan helps develop actions to stimulate the company’s growth sustainably and profitably. Thus, the organization is better prepared to face potential disruptions and turn them into opportunities.

Why Use a Consultant?

Consulting an external expert like ACM Canada is generally more effective when developing strategic planning. A consultant provides an objective and detached view, identifying unsuspected development paths and potential biases of an internal vision alone. An external expert with rich and diverse experience can adapt to each company’s specifics and propose tailored solutions. Hiring a consultant saves valuable time through proven methodologies and effective tools. Following a structured approach, the consultant ensures comprehensive coverage of strategic issues and the identification of precise action levers.

Conclusion

ACM Canada supports you in developing an essential strategic plan for your organization. This document provides a clear and shared vision of the future, allowing you to anticipate changes efficiently, allocate resources, and mobilize your teams around a joint project. This dynamic tool should also evolve over time to remain relevant. Regularly reassess your roadmap and adjust it to adapt to new opportunities and challenges.