Strategic Action Planning

This service is focused on assisting clients in identifying, prioritizing, and monitoring its key strategic action items. These action items typically include the major investments, initiatives, and projects that have been designed to close its performance gaps and help transform the enterprise into one that can more effectively compete in its target markets.

High performance companies share a common characteristic—they unerringly understand and keep visible these typically few critical initiatives. Their successful execution is considered vital to achieving their goals.

These action items are captured and managed using a mechanism called the strategic action plan.

This approach involves identifying and tightly linking our client’s goals, strategies, processes, and projects into a simple unified framework that greatly facilitates strategic governance and ensures that the organization stays focused on the priorities that matter.

Three tools have become important elements of our strategic action planning approach.

The goal-strategy matrix illustrates the degree to which a given strategy is actually advancing each enterprise goal, thus ensuring that the strategies are tightly coupled to the enterprise goals.

The strategy-process matrix indicates which business and technology processes are supporting and enabling each strategy. This tool not only identifies the impact each business process has on the various strategies, but also describes the functional and technical adequacy (quality, cost, cycle time, reliability, etc.) of those business processes. This degree of strategic impact together with the adequacy assessment helps prioritize those business processes with the greatest return potential. These high-return areas are typically the source of a client’s strategic projects.

Finally, the process-project matrix illustrates the degree to which a given strategic project is extending or improving each business or technology process. This tool ensures that the project portfolio (containing both existing and new projects) is always focused on improving and supporting those particular business processes with the greatest benefit, impact, and return.

Other Strategy services:

Strategy Development Business and Technology Strategy Alignment