Part One of No One Plans to Fail, They Simply Fail to Plan, discussed the value of strategic planning in the growth and success of an organization. Part Two will examine the details of carrying out your organization’s plan. 

As you create an organization’s strategic plan it is important to understand the time threshold. How long do you want or need to take to complete the plan, evaluate results, and start over? That’s right, you're not done; once you have completed this plan, it's time to plan again based on accomplishments and new circumstances. In the past it was very common to create five and 10 year plans. Today, with ever changing technologies and up and down financial landscapes, it makes more sense to look at shorter time frames, perhaps two years. With that in mind, set goals that can be accomplished within that time frame. It is reasonable to set from four to seven goals, splitting them between internal and external activities. Internal may have an impact on management practices, employee succession or policies, or financial practices. External examples may include marketing plans, customer service policies, or changes in product lines or services offered.             

The planning flow is:

1.   Goal determination, your targets for creating successful change; 

2.   Your strategies for each goal, how you are going to hit your targets (depending on how broad the scope of the goal you may have a couple of different strategies or several); and  

3.   The action steps, the daily activities that will bring the plan to life and are the basis for your annual work plans. Depending on the nature of your organization, this level of detailed planning might be done by the planning group, by staff or by a mix of both. For the greatest buy-in, the more participation from those implementing the actions, the better the results will be. The full plan should be reviewed by the original planning group to ensure there continued support and to allow for comment, but at that point should not be micromanaged by the committee. The idea is to maximize support and buy-in from all stakeholders from those who created the goals, to anyone responsible for implementation.

The final points of concern are keeping the plan alive and moving. Implementation, getting it all done, is accomplished by incorporating the actions into your annual work plans and daily tasks. Each action step must be evaluated—the act of checking your progress and making sure your actions produce desired results. It is also critical to include the following in each action step:

• The action,
• Who is in charge of implementing the action,
• The resources needed,
• The projected completion date,
• The completion verification, and
• The criteria used to evaluate your result.  

Finally, be prepared to make adjustments. There may be changes to the action steps that are not producing results and then adjustments in order to make them work.  

Proper planning takes time and effort and a good outside facilitator is key. But if you invest well in a planning strategy, you can exert reasonable control over your future and derive tremendous benefits. Success is not an accident, usually it results from a series of deliberate actions, the kind of actions that a well thought out plan can provide.