Core Components of the Strategic Plan: Implementation Considerations

Some say that plans are useless and planning is everything. I might extend this perspective to suggest that planning without action is, well, nothing, or at best an exercise. We plan to take the best course into the future and implementation is a natural extension of planning activities. The boundary between well crafted strategy and the journey of implementation can be hazy, but it does not need to be. The section discusses important considerations when moving from planning to implementing.

Implementation. Planning is a cyclical effort, we cycle between periods of discovery and tracking, to periods of visioning and goal setting, to periods of nose-to-the-grindstone action. Strategic plans can include reference to all of these or simply focus on the visioning and goal setting portions. More often than not, I see strategic plans limited to statements of strategy such as mission, vision, value, and goals. If this is the case, attention must be paid to the action or implementation plan that should accompany the strategy document. This is one reason why I recommend a system of living documents as a strategic plan, with some documents more stable through the entire planning period and other documents updated regularly and as things change in the environment.

With that, here are a few implementation considerations and definitions for the planning process:

Implementation Plans. Detailed documents that take the strategic plan strategy by strategy and include details required for implementing the strategies. Some elements of an implementation plan include but are not limited to: time or planning horizon, expected outcomes, tracking metrics, actions to be taken, resources required, costs, responsible manager, and individuals named by their assigned actions. Some of these are expanded in the definitions below.

Action Plans. The collected specific actions required to implement a strategy. Action plans can take in many and multiple forms depending the requirements of the strategy. At minimum, the action plans should list actions one by one and sequenced. Action plans can also include a tracking function that indicates the status of the action such as pending, in progress, or completed. Some organizations use full-blown project management processes to manage action planning.

Accountability Matrix. Most successful strategic plan systems include sufficient detail to track progress in a sort of accountability matrix. In the matrix, each strategy has a number of individuals with different roles. These roles may include actions, resource management, responsibility for outcomes, authority to make changes, etc. The grand matrix allow executives to quickly understand how implementation is being managed and accomplished.

Resource Determination and Funding. A difficult task is estimating the resources required to implement a strategy. During the process we ask: What might this cost? What revenue might be generated? What are the human resource requirements? Are there yearly estimates and projections? Once we have a reasonable estimate we turn to the fundraising needs the plan demands. Part of the financial and action planning that accompany the strategic plan involves the best sequence activities so the strategies can be realized.

Managing Resources. Many strategies require human and financial resources to implement. It can be helpful to consolidate the managing functions of these resources strategy by strategy with a single manager so that funds can be released for expenditure, budgets can be overseen, and progress toward goals can be tracked.

Authority and Responsible. Responsibility for actions and outcomes can be managed down to the specific action level or at high levels in the taxonomy such as goal or strategy. Authority over a strategy gives an individual the ability to make significant changes when necessary within the strategy to optimize actions, resources, or outcomes. Accountability, management, responsibility, and authority can be placed with a single individual or with multiple individual or groups depending on the complexity of the organization and plan.

Tracking Progress. Each strategy or goal should have a measured starting point, ending point, and perhaps milestones along the way. Progress is tracked by monitoring metrics or key indicators at various intervals. The implementation plan should include details about how progress will be tracked. Many organizations use KPIs or key performance indicators to track high-level organization performance measures. Some use KPIs to track strategic plan progress. While some KPIs are useful for this, I have found that most are not. Strategies often require specialized metrics. I like to call these KSIs or key strategic indicators, differentiating them from KPIs.

Correcting Course. Regular evaluation should be conducted during implementation strategy by strategy and goal by goal to be sure progress is meeting expectations. When gaps develop, careful evaluation should uncover the reasons. A successful adaptive planning process is dynamic and responsive to changing conditions. The overall strategic plan should allow for necessary course corrections with outcomes deviate from expectations. Sometimes this is due to internal conditions and other times the organization's environment change to such a degree that strategies must be significantly overhauled or even abandoned.

So we must answer the question, are these implementation details part of the strategic plan or are they included in a separate action plan? And depending on that answer, then are there corresponding documents and if so, how many and what are their contents? Again there is no perfect answer, it is a matter of utility for the organization. The system that provides be best changes of understand, communicating, and using the documents is the best one.

Expedition Mapping. One more thought about implementation before concluding. In practice, I see the strategy development phase end before the implementation planning begins. I think this is a mistake. I often find that strategy development could be better informed if implementation were thought through and tested a bit before the strategies are finalized. In the entire process vision and strategy are the most difficult to change once fully developed. It is easy to create an unattainable strategy, in fact, some strategists advocate for audacious strategies as a way to push organizations. As much as I like to stretch, if an organization does not have the resources, funds, or inspiration to achieve success, the entire plan can fail.

The handoff from the strategy generation to the implementation phase is an important one and a common place for plans to fail. Because of this, I have developed a number of tools to help manage the transition, informing plan development in both directions. One of these is called Expedition Mapping. I have an article available on this technique. Here is a snippet from the introduction:

Expedition mapping is a strategic planning and execution methodology that helps ensure success at reaching difficult organizational destinations. Expedition mapping is a new method for strategic implementation that blends together storytelling, action planning, resource analysis, and adaptive, ongoing environmental scanning – and it is delivered in a mix of face-to-face and online collaborative activities.

In conclusion. This article is by no means a roadmap to creating a strategic plan, but it does outline some of the foundational elements of the process and possible components of strategy. I attempted to expose some of the important decisions that need to be made along the way and move the discussion, a difficult transition, from planning to implementing strategy.

If you combine the suggestions and guidelines I have offered here with many of the related process recommendations and methodologies I outlined in related articles, you begin to get a more full picture of what it takes to form and implement strategy. The entirety of strategy crafting, however, is not yet fully exposed – more to come.

Soon I will begin to share insights gained about the future of strategy crafting. I am calling these innovations in strategy crafting. They are innovations because they are different approaches to crafting strategy and go beyond the tradition toolbox that many of us share the use.