January | 2013
Successful strategic planning is an elusive goal for many companies. Harvard Business Review puts the ROI of traditional planning at 34% or less, and other studies have pegged the failure rate at 70% and sometimes even as high as 90%.
One reason for the high failure rate is that planning tends to be treated as an annual event rather than an ongoing process. Moreover, most organizations fail to align their strategies with their processes and technology. As problems occur in such companies, different silos of activity independently make operational changes on the fly that render the strategic plan irrelevant until it is revised the next year.
A successful strategic plan is a dynamic, living document of actions that are grounded in the true drivers of an organization's activities. The plan can reflect new goals and ideas, of course, but it must align with existing processes and technology or, at a minimum, define paths towards alignment that can be realistically executed. The way to create such a plan is through a process called Strategy Alignment and Deployment, or SA&D.
SA&D aligns a strategy with all areas of an organization and then guides its execution. The alignment piece validates that all proposed changes support the organization's strategic goals, while the execution piece defines specific activities that each part of the organization must accomplish. In short, SA&D turns talk into goal-oriented action.
SA&D starts with three requirements:
Driving strategy to execution is a big undertaking, so it is important to remember that most organizations require several iterations of execution to become proficient in the SA&D process. I don't claim that SA&D is an overnight fix, but it is a sustainable, even transformative one. Those who stick with it will achieve their strategic plan's goals and objectives while becoming the most competitive organization in their industry.
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© 2021 Wipro Limited |
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