Whether it is operations, business development or project execution for your business, planning and development of a strategic operating plan, comprehensive business strategy for growth or developing a project execution plan is the best way to guarantee your success. As a professional and executive in the AEC marketing place, I can attest to the great success these plans, guidance and strategy will afford you and your team(s). Working through a planning process with your team(s) will provide a dialogue with your team that will inspire fellowship and commitment from the entire team. Start out with a strategic planning document that includes who are the key participants, the key objectives, proposed results and a milestone schedule. Have a startup meeting with your team and line out the objective, results and schedule for your plan. Let your team interact with you and provide input to the entire program. Discuss what research is necessary and who is or are the best to do this.
Ask for input to the schedule and develop a more detailed schedule with collaboration from you team. Make assignments, an action item list and publish this to all attendees. Have your team commit to the overall schedule and the program. Make sure you provide reasonable expectations to each of your team members from their normal work requirements to guarantee the success of the planning effort. Decide how you want to setup these planning sessions. Will you do these in house or offsite? Will these be one- or two-hour sessions or a whole day or two? Much of this will depend on your organization and its structure and culture. How much time you allow weekly for you and your team will give you a handle on the total duration of the schedule. Consider how quickly you want the results. You don’t have to decide all of this upfront, but work with your team over the first three sessions on a reasonable schedule.
Develop an outline for the final document. Determine how you want it to be used with your team. Develop monitoring, tracking, reporting and key performance indicators. Try to make the planning and working on this interesting and fun. Decide what resources and other input you will need from your team or any outside resource.
Michael S. Shapiro Consultants LLC has been doing this for over 20 years and can work with you and your team through the process to ensure that the process will be successful, fully implemented and used.
There are many strategic planning tools on the market such as smartsheet, strategy point, cascade elate, achieve it, Clare Point Strategy, Customer Relationship Management and Salesforce to name a few. Each of these provides a certain level of simplicity or sophistication. Over my 20 years of strategic planning I have collected, and developed and used many of these tools, but they are only tools. They can help and give you some ideas, but experience and leadership in strategic planning cannot be replaced by any tool.
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