Best practices in strategic planning and process alignment
The secret to a great team: Align process to strategy.
You need lateral vision to point your team in the right direction. The Strategic Planning and Process Team is ready to help you succeed. Please use the resources below to jump-start your strategic planning.
Running a strategic planning session
Strategic planning is best conducted with critical stakeholders. They offer important perspectives and grow depth of understanding.
- Assess your environment for situational awareness.
- Consider market influences.
- Assess your team’s internal strengths and aspirations.
- Identify opportunities and threats in your environment.
- Determine the services your team need to best serve your market niche.
- How does your team need to change to provide those services effectively?
- What are the top one to three goals you need to hit to drive change?
- What metrics show movement toward those changes?
- Keep the momentum going by building the goals into your team’s annual evaluation.
Self-help tools
Strategic planning template: A quick start to get your team talking. They should answer the questions together to create a shared vision. You should expect disagreement and surprise at the many perspectives. A facilitator is best to help the sort through their visions of the future.
Building teamwork through process improvement
The art of untangling process messes boils down to collaboration and ownership. People can feel threatened by change, but they usually are passionate about doing a good job. Leaders can effect change by setting a strategic vision and inviting the team to work toward it.
- Explain the problem(s) and the goal(s).
- Help your team envision its existing process(es).
- Ask them to design the process(es) for the future, keeping your strategic goal(s) in mind.
- Manage differences of opinion carefully, always being empathetic, and asking for their solutions to move forward.
- Map out the desired future workflow.
Self-help tools
- Process swim lanes: This tool helps you map out process steps and everyone’s roles. The current state raises awareness. The future state visualizes process efficiencies.
- Process landscape: Each phase of the process often has multiple subprocesses. This helps you visualize their groupings in a single landscape.
- Process scope diagram: A visual summary of the process phases and critical areas to consider.
- Process assessment poster: An executive summary of key issues and resolutions in the process(es).
- RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) diagram: The matrix identifies key roles and levels of responsibility.