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Consulting Services
Strategic Planning Consulting Services Offered:
Our firm has learned through direct experience in facilitating strategic
planning sessions with top management, that plans fail in the
traditional organization for a distinct list of reasons:
First: "hipshot" thinking. Too many strategic planning
sessions are accomplished over a stint in a nice resort. The time is
often compressed to a few days for such critical planning. Executives
don't have much of a chance to think through their assignments.
Second: quite often only a few key executives are involved in
the planning sessions. Functional departments may not be represented in
a plan that consequently affects them. This results in having too few
owners of the plan.
Third: when a plan is devised, it may not be authored by
people below the first tier of management. The old paradigm is that the
top executives are the best qualified to accomplish the planning. Since
the participation is limited, those responsible for daily operations in
the firm have no authorship in the future of the company: no "buy-in."
Fourth: when the strategic plan is finished, it often dies at
the end of the sessions because it is not integrated with the annual
business plan or the annual budget. In this instance, life goes on in
the organization the same way it did before the strategic planning
session.
Fifth: too few people are measured by the success or failure
of the plan. If too few feet are held to the fire for the plan's
outcome, it has little chance of success. We believe that you get what
you measure. Measure the results of the plan, and you will get results.
Sixth: hardly anyone gets paid as a result of the success or
failure of the strategic plan. Except for a few key executives who have
objectives to meet to make their bonuses, pay systems generally tend to
be mutually exclusive from the success of a strategic plan. Workers and
salaried people, in addition to middle managers, are paid as a result
of some obscure compensation system.
Seventh: individual and team efforts are seldom ever tied to
the outcome of the company's strategy. Workers respond to how they are
measured. They know that keeping the machines running increases
utilization, that's what they have been taught that the company wants,
and so they build inventory, even when its not needed.
Eighth: most workers, whether they be executives, salaried,
or labor, don't know how to behave as a team member. Our society
teaches us to be heroes, to worship heroes, and that we are rewarded
for individualistic efforts. It starts in school with academic and
sport competition. The hero is the pitcher with the most games won, or
the quarterback with the most yards gained. We foster entrepreneurial
efforts in business. As a result, most team efforts in the company
boardroom are feigned.
The overall quality of the long range plan increases substantially when
executives have an opportunity to think through the ramifications of
their actions. The best situation is when a plan is devised during one
or two day sessions, twice a month, over a period of several months.
This allows assignments to be given out in between sessions, and
provides the executives a chance to spend more concentrated time on the
assignment at home, or in the evenings when they are more relaxed.
The quality of each individual's contribution to the plan vastly
improves. Then, the results of the assignments are brought in to the
sessions and synthesized with the efforts of others to achieve a much
higher quality plan.
Please see one of our Strategic Planning success stories:
Strategic Planning and Reducing Lead Times In High-Tech Design/Build
The Strategic Planning consulting and facilitation services we offer,
as part of our Supply Chain Management consulting portfolio, are:
Raising awareness and involving everyone in building a new direction.
Developing a new competitive direction for your business and becoming more customer driven.
Developing the master plan while building a custom strategy for inducing radical change.
Developing cohesiveness among managers using a team building approach that focuses on results.
Creating a cohesive team environment through high involvement.
Formulating teams to streamline processes, improve productivity and substantially reduce costs.
Developing missions, goals and objectives for self-managing teams that vertically link with the company's strategic direction.
Using a state-of-the-art tool to integrate the vision with annual business/budget planning, and daily operations.
Developing measurable action plans to ensure success.
Creating accountabilities and linking the new direction with performance measurement and reward systems
Collaborative Mission Statement Development
Collaborative Statement of Purpose Development
Collaborative Core Values Statement Development
Top-down Objectives/Goals
Vertically/Horizontally-Integrated Action Plans
Collaborative KPI Development
SWOT Analysis
Gap Analysis
Performance-based Reward System Development
Performance Metric Development
Benchmarking
Global Outsourcing
Acquisition Assessment
Due Diligence
Top Management Facilitation
Contact us (click here) for more information on how we can improve your operations.
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