Organize your company with a Strategic Plan (Follow-up)

This series of articles have been dedicated to a tool that I think it is very useful for any type of company regardless of its size: the strategic plan. Therefor on the last posts I have been mentioning the different pieces a Strategic plan should have: Mission statement, Vision statement, strategic objectives, indicators and goals and finally action plans and responsible. However, this time I have decided to close with a reflection that is the importance of making a follow-up to the strategic plan.

As in any document we might create for our business (for example: processes, corporate governance, rules and many others) they are useless if they are going to be presented and then filed away and forgotten. For all these tools to be useful and add to the company they must first be created, but afterward they must be constantly reviewed, which can be even more important.

Talking about the Strategic Plan, it is vital to review it frequently and to make adjustments if it is necessary. There are many ways to make a follow-up to the strategic plan even using technology, but at least I recommend to use a spreadsheet where you register the strategic objectives, their indicators and action plans and record their evolution. If we talk about action plans, it is good to observe how they have developed and if we talk about indicators it is very important to be able to evaluate them periodically. I also like to see the traffic lights we can implement on our spreadsheets, in order to understand, how our indicator is progressing (Green: we are doing great; yellow: caution! something is happening and we need to fix it and red: we are doing very bad).

All this is very useful because it gives us real information in order to decide what we should do. If for example one of the indicators of a strategic objective is in red, we must evaluate if we need to change our action plans, because we are not obtaining what we stated or maybe the goals are very high.

With all this it is going to be easy to decide what to do and correct our way in order to reach all the goals we have determined as Strategic objectives for our company.

I hope this series of articles have been very valuable for you and your company. I invite you to follow our blog An Entrepreneur, where we talk about many business tools and different elements that will be useful for your company.

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