New Year, New Strategic Plan

As 2017 comes to a close, people and businesses alike start to think about New Year’s resolutions. The end of the year is a time to look at your business’ progress and plan how you want it to develop.

A strategic plan is a valuable tool that can help any kind of business thrive in today’s world if done right. A company that has a detailed business strategy and a clear vision of its future will be driven in purpose and effective in its messaging.

 

Involve others in strategic planning

A business is not made up of one person, but a group of people that work together to serve a purpose. The entire team should be invested in the company. Involving them in setting goals and planning for the future will drive employee engagement. Find a strategic planning template that will fit with your team and go from there.

StrategyBlocks has multiple options that are highly customizable for any plan. Your secure data is updated in real time, the platform highlights duplication of work and cross-departmental inefficiencies. Our SaaS platform also gives you a complete view of the execution performance enterprise-wide. We’ve found that organizations who take a top-down, bottom-up approach to strategy execution tend to be the most successful, as key stakeholders across the spectrum are involved and in the know.

 

Communicate more and in more ways

The beginning of the year is the perfect time to communicate your objectives and plans for a strategy map for the upcoming year. This will help your company save time and ensure that projects start as cohesively as possible.

Although you may think you are getting your point across through an email you need to consider using more platforms than one. To ensure the message is received requires communicating more frequently and through different ways.

As a leader, it is particularly important to get to know your team personally and learn how they communicate and respond to certain behaviors. As a team, look at what worked for your business this past year and what you can improve on in the upcoming year.

 

Focus on the future

In order for your company to succeed, you want your employees to improve. This means you need to focus on the future and learn from the past. To be the most effective coach for your team, help them improve their skills, and by extension, their results.

This can also apply to customer service. In Forrester’s  “The Data Digest: A Happy New Year!”, Anjali Lai states “In the business world, companies that set higher standards also set new consumer expectations and secure customer loyalty.”

A big part of setting goals for your company is making sure you have a way to track your success. Metrics allow outcomes to be measured. Data can be automatically gathered, processed, and calculated to assess performance. With the highly customizable layout of StrategyBlocks’ Cascading Value Tree, you can have real-time visibility into strategic initiatives and outcomes across departments.

It’s time now to devote efforts into strategy planning for 2018. Creating and implementing a highly visual strategic plan can only be beneficial to your company in this upcoming year.