An Entrepreneur Blog Management, Strategy, Internet, Technology, Social Networks, Organizational Change and more!
Returning to the series of articles I have written about the strategic plan, maybe to this point it might sound very strategic and not very tactic, or in other words many objectives to obtain but without a clear roadmap in order to achieve these goals. Therefore, I have explained that we must start with a clear mission and vision statement, define strategic objectives, indicators and goals for these objectives.
But the strategic plan goes beyond these points and states the way to achieve these strategic objectives with action plans. Therefore, the next step is to determine action plans for each strategic objective. Generally, we state more than an action plan for each objective and these might be recurrent activities as well as projects. I am going to explain what I just said with an example. If one of the strategic objectives is turning into the company that sells the most in our industry (just as an example, it isn’t the best strategic objective!) a recurrent action plan might be performing a monthly follow up to our sellers an an action plan that is a project will be give to all our sellers a vehicle (in order to travel easily and quickly).
These action plans might also be framed in different periods of time. For example, some can be needed in the short term and others in medium term and long term. This is logically taking into account that as the company achieves some goals its requirements will shift. Once again, as an easy example I will talk about shifting from paper forms, to Excel tables and then to a more robust platform, but all of them pointing to the same objective.
Additional to what I just pointed out, it is important to not only establishing action plans but people or areas responsible of implementing them. All of them must have at least one mourner that materializes the action plan. It doesn’t work having action plans if there it is not someone responsible of executing them.
With my next post I finish these series of articles writing about the follow up of the strategic plan.
Image taken from Flickr.com
