How to Make a Strategic Plan ? – { Part 4 }
We are now on part four of our five-part series of strategy planning, plan within a plan. If you want to gather more information on how to start your own strategic planning, you can check the preceding articles that cover different questions under different areas of the strategy. The main subjects of this article are the strategy resources needed in order to implement strategy planning and its processes and tasks. Just like the common plan we encounter when coming up with a business or project, strategy resources are crucial factors of an organization—you can utilize them in any area such as project management, business proposals, and innovating new ideas.
The following strategy resources are materials, people, tools, and funds that are often restricted—it means that they are limited in terms of usage. You may have free reign over these strategy resources, but it doesn’t entirely mean you get to use them without boundaries. This has been a standard in companies since resources are not easy to come by; especially it involves spending huge amounts of money.
Determining what type of strategy resources; the three questions below will give you an in-depth information on who are the people responsible for certain tasks and member training, and the materials that are ideal and appropriate for strategic planning.
Within Strategy Resources, What Are The Necessary Materials?
Materials or tools come in any shape or form and can be abstract or concrete. Depending on your plan, these strategy resources help drive the organization towards a goal. Materials are:
Facilities: rooms or conference halls used for meetings or team retreats/team building, audio rooms for special scenarios relevant to the business or organizational improvement
Supplies: visual aids like charts, diagrams or bar graphs for presentation and reporting purposes, pens, paper, whiteboard
Equipment: This includes photocopy machines, projectors, laptops or desktop computers
Some materials are already stored in a department’s stock supply, but stakeholders include them during a project request, along with funds and schedule.
What Are The Terminologies To Be Used?
Strategy resources need to have their own names or labels so as not to create confusion among the team. Some organization departments create a culture where staff members share jargons that they only get to understand, which can sometimes be merely words for those who don’t belong in that department. Attaching terminologies on strategic resources will help the plan to be more organized.
What is name or term are you going to give to your highest and sub-priorities? Commonly used terms are objectives, goals, or tasks. Some words are common jargons used in most organizations around the world such as “action plans”, “mission”, and “profit”. Sometimes, the simpler is better and you can always put your own spin by asking the members what other words they want to add to the roster.
What Are Your Training Methods For Your Planners?
People assume that planning is easy and there’s no need to study a thing or two about it. Wrong. Every part of the job is the learning process and your human strategy resources should have full knowledge and understanding of the overall elements of a plan and its process. People who will be responsible for planning should get the summary of the following:
- The basic goal of the process of strategic planning.
- The planning structure to use.
- The timetable for plan production.
- Terminologies being utilized during planning and process.
- Decisions that need to be made over the plan’s process.
- The decisions and committee’s roles during the process.
Now that you are able to identify the strategic resources and how to utilize them effectively, it’s time for you to move to the next round which you will find in the fifth article of the plan within a plan series.
Subscribe To Our Newsletter
Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
