As the calendar year draws to a close in December, you’ll probably find yourself getting into review mode. If December is also the end of your fiscal year, the review will likely be pretty structured and include financials, operating measures, and organizational and personal objectives.  Even if it’s not the end of your fiscal year, you may very well find yourself in a reflective mood and engaged in some kind of informal assessment of 2017.  It’s the mood of the season.  What did we accomplish?  What have we learned?  What do we want to change in 2018?

Go with the Flow: Even though our schedule is especially tight during the holidays, December and January are excellent months to plan for and undertake a structured review of performance, for several reasons:

• For many organizations, it is the end of a fiscal year. For those with a July-June fiscal year, it is the half-way point. And for most of the rest with a fiscal year ending in September, it is the end of the first quarter, which is a great time to pause and assess how the new fiscal year has started. There is still time to make adjustments.
• Even if it is not the end of your fiscal year, it is the end of it for many other organizations. That means those organizations will be rolling out new initiatives and making subtle, or not so subtle, shifts in focus. The first quarter of the calendar year can be a period of significant change in your market and in your industry.
• In December, many associations and research organizations release “year in review” reports and “annual forecasts” for the new year, providing an annual spike in fresh industry and market information.

A Balanced Review: So the timing is right.  But what should you include in your year-end review?  Apart from the obvious financial and operating performance measures and objectives, most organizations readily take stock of accomplishments.  And that’s a good idea.  However, take a look at failures as well. What tactics were abandoned, becouse they did not turn out to be as important as originally thought, or they just weren’t feasible?  What strategies failed?  And most importantly, what did we learn from these failures?  Did you conduct any kind of Lessons Learned review?  If not, it’s probably not too late.  For many organizations, the knowledge gained from failure analysis sometimes leads to their most successful innovations.

The Bigger Picture: So in your review, include the usual performance measures, successes and failures, and one more focus: alignment.  Alignment has two components.  First, is your purpose (mission statement) and your desired future state (vision or goals) still aligning with the needs of your marketplace and customer and the direction of your industry?  Remember those “year in review” and “annual forecasts” publications I mentioned earlier?  And secondly, do you have alignment within your own organization, between the purpose (mission), desired future state (vision / goals), and the latest thinking around the Tactics that will get you there.  Tactics are the most fluid part of the Strategic Plan.  Taking it further, does your strategic direction still align with your financial health (how are we doing?), feedback from your customers (what are they telling you), and the culture you are creating (what values would be catalysts to your vision/goals)?

Looking Back to Move Forward: In all of your review, don’t lose sight of one of the main reasons for review: creating something better.  The clear perspective on where you are at, your current organizational status, will enable you to make better decisions about the scope, pace, and extent of change to undertake in the upcoming months.  Should you add tactics related to a particular goal?  Can you afford more infrastructure investment than you thought, or less?  Is there an emerging trend in your industry that you need to better leverage?  With a well-designed year-end review, you’ll know where you’ve been, but you will also know better where you can go.  Reviews, then, can be a critical component of readiness assessment.

If you would like help designing, preparing for, or facilitating a productive year-end review, contact me at your convenience.

A good friend and colleague of mine has the following quote at the end of his e-mail signature block:

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”     – Anotoine De Saint-Exupery

As a consultant specializing in Strategic Planning, you can well imagine how much I like this quote. It is a great endorsement of the value of a plan.  And while I would be among the first to espouse the benefits of having a good plan, a plan is just a beginning.

The End of the Beginning Some of you who have endured long and arduous Strategic Planning processes might be dismayed with this concept.  “You mean after all that work, we are just getting started?  I was ready to celebrate crossing the finish line.”  Don’t get me wrong.  Completing a well-developed Strategic Plan is definitely a milestone.  But it is still only a plan.  It will take deployment, execution, measurement, reviews, modification, and more execution and measurement to realize any of the Goals or Vision embodied in the Plan.

Things Change...Faster than Ever Some of that work involves implementing tactics as identified in the initial plan document.  However, we all know the pace of change is faster than ever.  So it stands to reason that some of those initial tactics may have a limited shelf life.  At any time, change in the industry, your market place, or in customer preferences may dictate that some of the original tactics be re-evaluated and/or others be added to your Plan.

Go Beyond the “Plan” When viewed this way, the finalization of a three year Strategic Plan document really is just the beginning of three years of work.  But without this work, it is doubtful anything will really change.  So, if you are starting off the New Year with a New Plan, congratulations.  But know that the real work, the work that will ultimately result in change, is just beginning.  If I were going to try to come up with a quote that captures this aspect of Strategic Planning, and pattern it after the one above, it might be something like “A Plan without implementation is just a proposal.”

If I can help take your plan beyond proposal to reality, with deployment, execution tools, measurement systems, a review process, or tactics, contact me at your convenience.

Jeff

Fall is often a time when organizations are developing new Strategic or Annual Operating Plans.  As part of that work, you may be identifying the need for a new service or product.  Once the larger organizational plan is complete, a team is usually formed to engage in the more detailed design work and preparations to launch the product or service.  In that work, the team would be wise to anticipate possible failures or breakdowns in the product or service delivery and undertake steps to prevent them from occurring. Read more