This course is intended for participants who wish to enhance strategic planning skills to optimize performance and organizational growth.

Overview of Strategy

• Learn the meaning and critical elements of strategy
• Understand two orientations to strategy and determine the continuum
• Explore three approaches to strategy
• Assess the current strategy of your organization
• Assess the current results of your organization
• Learn the strategic design sequence you will follow in clarifying your strategy

Analyzing the Business Environment

• Review current market conditions and key competitors
• Identify key customers, key stakeholders, and their expectations
• Identify key suppliers and rate your relationship with them
• Identify external factors influencing your organization
• Evaluate current market conditions affecting your organization
• Review the strengths and weaknesses of key competitors

Forecasting the Future

• Identify assumptions about the future environment of the organization
• Reduce this list into the “big hitters,” which define your future business situation
• Evaluate the impact of the “big hitters” on your organization
• Determine how your organization might respond to each of these assumptions
• Identify alternative future business situations
• Conduct a SWOT analysis to prepare to effectively manage future
• business situation

Creating Core Ideology

• Understand the role of a core ideology in your organization’s success
• Learn about the ideologies of some of the most successful companies
• Explore the legacy of your organization
• Define your organization’s mission
• Analyze the beliefs that have created your culture
• Reach consensus on your guiding principles

Defining Your Strategic Direction

• The primary questions that must be answered to establish strategic direction
• Clarify a vision of your organization five years in the future
• Identify the characteristics of current customers and the deliverables provide to them
• Describe future customers and how your deliverables and products or services may change to meet their needs
• Explore your organization’s core competencies and define the competencies you will need in order to compete in the future

Defining Your Competitive Advantage

• Understand customer’s perception of value as the foundation of differentiation
• Create a long-term business focus
• Identify competitive differentiators within your industry
• Do a competitor analysis against the competitive differentiators
• Select competitive anchors that distinguish you from your competitors and competitive necessities that define in which area you must keep up
• Develop a value position

Setting Goals

• Understand the importance of setting goals and tracking performance
• Learn the building blocks of goal-setting
• Identify your organization’s key result areas
• Establish metrics in each of your key result areas
• Assess your current performance
• Set goals in each of your key result areas
• Evaluate your feedback system

Creating a Master Plan

• Importance of an integrated, master plan for managing your organization
• Select a number of critical success factors for your organization
• Identify major performance initiatives to implement your ideal vision
• Fill out a performance initiatives matrix showing the relationship between your critical success factors and performance initiatives
• Learn how to create a project charter to guide the implementation of each initiative
• Know how to commission project teams for each initiative
• Understand the basics for project management and how to use a project implementation worksheet