More Effective Strategic Planning Processes—
Action Planning and Implementation Support
Strategic planning processes are the easy part of the job. Almost always, it is the implementation phase that is difficult. We see quite a number of planning sessions that lead to weak implementations despite the high quality of the plans and the good intentions of everyone involved. What happens?
Business happens. As soon as participants get back to their offices, business as usual takes over. Executing on the plan is quickly subordinated to customers, clients, employees, crises and the thousand other needs facing a typical manager or executive daily.
Action plans that do get implemented share one important characteristic:
They have external follow-up and the follow-up process is regular, strong and supportive. The best follow-up is CEO-driven.
Some not very inspired plans have produced amazing results when driven by a persistent, strong executive. Why doesn't this happen in more cases? Because follow-up is generally a thankless, time-consuming job. It requires prodding folks who are always overloaded. It requires helping them work through priorities and deciding what doesn't need doing. It requires many reminders for both status reports and plan updates.
Some top executives farm this job out to their assistants, thinking that it will be regarded as coming from the top person themself. Doesn't work this way. If the messages and support are not delivered by the top person, most get ignored.
It is sometimes possible to assign follow-up to a senior executive who is not heavily involved in day-to-day responsibilities — typically an outgoing CEO (now chairman) or an outgoing executive who is moving toward retirement. These kinds of people often have enough clout and respect to get the implementation jobs done and they have enough time free to do the necessary follow-up.
If you think of the planning process as a "strategic program", then the job becomes one of program management. This job can vary in responsibility from complete, as when the CEO or COO handles it, to little or none at all, as when an unlucky administrative assistant to some manager gets tagged with the mechanics of the follow-up process. Effectiveness demands at least some degree of real clout in order to persuade busy people to cut into their schedules for action plan execution.
Our Services
We have a somewhat different approach to providing action planning and implementation support to executives and managers. We typically work directly for the CEO or other top executive so that we can enlist our "sponsor" where needed. Quite often, this will involve committing additional resources or making a major change to the plans as a result of encountering early obstacles. In other cases, the plan itself may come into question as new information surfaces. Our role is to handle as much of the background communication and follow-up as possible on behalf of the lead executive. We use electronic interactions wherever practical to minimize the cost of our support.
We provide our executive client with regular status reports, plan updates showing progress, notes on important findings or milestone achievements, and other information that should be of interest. We look for evidence of adverse side effects and unanticipated but beneficial consequences. We also look for business opportunities in the flow of information. Where necessary, we will work with the person having implementation lead responsibility to develop plan adjustments as new information becomes available.
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If you have questions or would like to discuss action planning and
implementation support services, please contact us.