What is the Process for Creating a Strategic Plan? Part 2

It is a 4 step process: 1. Understanding 2. Analysis 3. Planning 4. Action Step 2: Analysis You can not analyze what you do not understand! So once you have thoroughly completed Step 1, start the analysis. Now specifics come into play, How will you balance workplace demographics, processes of manufacturing, structure of the organization and its culture, regulatory requirements, market changes, capacity limits? Analysis! Current versus needs. Options. Analyze, change a piece of the scenario and analyze again, rinse and repeat, but how? What tools? There are several tools that can be used: 1. Scenario Planning 2. Systematic Layout Planning (SLP) 3. SWOT Analysis 4. Brainstorming 5. Strategic Creative Analysis (SCAN) 6. Benchmarking 1. Scenario Planning is used for thinking forward, looking at what changes might be needed and how they will affect the long term. For each potential change, analyze 3 future organizational scenarios: Best, Worst and Al Right. Note twhat the organizations response would be in each case.You will begin to find similarities in scenario, response, and them be able to make decisions to move forward. 2. SLP creates conceptual block layouts, adding complex data categories until a block layout has been generated, turning it into a strategic to tactical tool. 3. SWOT uses business objectives and identifies internal and external factors both positive and negative to accomplishing the objective. 4. Brainstorming beter ensures that various points of view and aspects are represented. There could however be too much input, so be judicious. Use a professional facilitator to keep things on track, and capture the views and aspects relevant to the process. 5. SCAN incorporates SWOT to analyze the Top Rated Objective (TRO), once the SWOT has been done on the TRO, ask if the objective is attainable, if no, select a new TRO and start over. If yes, derive strategies from the SWOTs. 6. Benchmarking uses the understanding gained from Step 1 to compare practices and metricsto recognized leaders. Adaptation is key to recognizing the right process for your organizatioin, making it your own, practice it continually. Next week: Planning