Information
Warehouse Home
Business
Plans Home (Article List)
|
Why Doesn’t Your Business Plan
Consistently Secure Your Desired Results?
|
|
by:
Leanne Hoagland-Smith
|
From small businesses to large corporations,
when you render all the challenges and issues facing these economic
engines from employees to growth and innovation, the inability to
secure desired results or implementation always float to the top as the
number one to number three obstacles that prevent business success. As
a business owner or management executive, have you ever asked yourself
one of these five questions:
1. How do I move from my vision to my desired results?
2. How do I get my employees to perform?
3. How do I recruit new employees with the skills that my company
needs?
4. How do I attract new customers or clients?
5. Why can’t I consistently achieve my desired results?
All of these questions when rendered down are about implementation. The
failure to implement each corporate wide business goal consumes
valuable resources specifically time, people and money. These resources
may have been already allocated to other initiatives.
Effective implementation is what separates the successful companies
from the not so successful ones. Many authors from Rick Page in
“Hope is not a Strategy” to Jason Jennings and
Laurence Haughton in “It’s Not the Big that Eat the
Small, It’s the Fast that East the Slow” write
about the affects of poor implementation.
Possibly why implementation continues to vex today’s
businesses is because executives search for an ineffective answer
through a business plan instead of a strategic business plan. A recent
search using Inventory Overture revealed that searches for business
plan were over 200 times as many as for strategic business plan
(148,650 vs. 614). From these searches, it suggests that business
owners may be looking for the wrong answer.
Why choose a strategic business plan over a business plan? The answer
is simple because a strategic business plan defines “Who Does
What By When” through the critical success factors and
supporting goals that are in alignment with the sales and marketing
plans.
The structure of a strategic business plan is all about implementation.
Using the ADDIE Plus methodology may help you in your efforts to create
an effective strategic business plan.
Assess - The current market conditions, future market conditions and
the organization need to be assessed. This evaluation should begin with
an overall organizational assessment and may extend to internal and
external customers.
Design – After the evaluation, a design is crafted. This
design should include the vision, values and mission of the
organization and is overall architecture for the plan. Simply, speaking
this is the “Big Picture.”
Develop – The plan is developed according to the structure of
the organization. Smaller plans or pictures such as marketing and sales
fit within the overall plan.
Implement - Using specific goal setting and goal achievement, the
strategic plan is implemented. At this juncture, who does what by when
is identified.
Evaluate – Goal achievement is the mechanism to monitor and
evaluate successful implementation.
Plus - Follow-up is the plus to ensure necessary course correction that
may again require some new assessments along with design, development,
implementation and evaluation.
Using the ADDIE+ methodology provides business owners a consistent
vehicle from which to create, monitor, evaluate and follow-up on their
strategic business plan.
If you truly want to reach that next level of success by bridging the
implementation gaps, stop focusing on a business plan and take the time
to create a strategic business plan that clearly defines who does what
by when.
Copyright 2005(c) Leanne Hoagland-Smith, www.processspecialist.com
About the author:
Leanne Hoagland-Smith helps individuals and organizations to double
results through innovative training and development. She builds
lifelong change through proven processes seeking that next level of
success. If increasing your revenue, improving your culture or finding
balance interests you, visit www.processspecialist.comor ask
to subscribe to complimentary copy of Power Choices a monthly
newsletter at info@processspecialist.com
Circulated by Article Emporium
|
|
©2005 - All Rights Reserved
|