4 Essential Steps for Mastering Continuous Strategic Planning
Strategic initiatives are typically prioritized based on the forecasted ROI that those efforts can drive for the business. However, throughout the execution and implementation of initiatives, changes in both internal and external demand can significantly impact the ROI outlook, and firms are often not aware of these shifts until they are experiencing limited benefits from substantial year-over-year investment. The inability to remain agile across your initiatives portfolio is likely one of the largest roadblocks you have in achieving business outcomes and driving higher returns.
Continuous strategic planning can address this shortcoming by ensuring agility and alignment with the constantly evolving demand. Unlike traditional annual planning cycles, continuous strategic planning involves consistently reviewing and adjusting priorities and resources for more effective and responsive decision-making.
In this blog, we delve into the key components, challenges, and best practices for building and managing effective and scalable continuous strategic planning cycles.
What Is Continuous Strategic Planning?
Continuous strategic planning involves an ongoing process of setting and assessing goals, analyzing data, engaging stakeholders, and adjusting plans based on new information or demand.
This approach contrasts with the traditional annual planning cycle, which often leaves organizations inflexible to adapt to new priorities or changes throughout the year. Continuous strategic planning offers benefits such as increased agility, improved decision-making, and better alignment with market changes.
Effective continuous planning relies on having a strong foundation across four key areas:
- Business Outcomes: Establish clear, measurable, and achievable goals and business-level outcomes that guide the organization’s efforts and are the basis for measuring successful delivery.
- Data-Driven Insights: Consistently utilize analytics and business intelligence across the portfolio lifecycle to inform strategic decisions and ensure transparency.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Involve key stakeholders in the planning process to ensure buy-in and alignment across investments. Clear roles and accountabilities must be agreed upon and enforced to create a culture of shared accountability for delivery and outcomes.
- Regular Review and Adjustment: Conduct regular reviews to adjust the strategic roadmap based on new information and changing circumstances. As new demand or non-negotiable items (like regulatory response) emerge, leverage your established planning routines to rebaseline the portfolio based on current demand, performance, and ROI outlook.
This approach works; even increasing the frequency of planning cycles from annually to quarterly can have a significant impact on your organization’s ability to adjust the initiatives portfolio in response to new business needs or internal and external demand.
Let’s now explore four tips for implementing continuous strategic planning cycles: starting with the business impact, prioritizing data transparency, getting stakeholders involved, and utilizing technology solutions.
1. Start with the Business Impact
When implementing continuous strategy cycles into your business, it’s important to start with the business impact and outcomes of each investment. Priority of investments is directly dependent on how much value they drive for the business—whether that’s in returns like increased profits or customer acquisition or in risk mitigation measures like enhanced resiliency or regulatory compliance.
Identifying not only how you will capture the business outcomes to inform the contract for delivery with the business but also how you will effectively assess the realization of these outcomes on a regular basis is critical for understanding what will be reviewed during your regular planning cycles and who is accountable for decisioning on those investments.
By focusing on the agreed-upon business outcomes, understanding how delivery has performed in the realization of those outcomes, and pressure-testing the current demand for those outcomes, your planning cycles will be able to create increased transparency into business delivery and better align your delivery to business goals on an ongoing basis. This approach not only makes the planning process more relevant but also ensures that the strategic initiatives undertaken are geared toward driving returns and value for the business.
2. Prioritize Data Transparency
While digital transformation and improved business intelligence have been areas of significant investment for many organizations, a lack of data quality and transparency—particularly across complex environments—is still a pervasive issue.
Investing in data cleanup, mapping, automation, and visibility efforts is crucial for effective continuous strategic planning. Portfolio reporting and analytics require data from a variety of different sources across lines of business and enterprise systems. Due to the complexity of this data (even for smaller organizations), the timeliness, integrity, and accessibility of this data are often a challenge. Identifying critical data sources and prioritizing work to drive accountability, alignment, and centralized role-based access to this data is a game-changer for portfolio analytics. It enables organizations to build strong business intelligence dashboards and reporting and, most importantly, fosters a data-driven culture across portfolio-decisioning.
Data-driven decision-making, scenario analysis, impact assessments, ROI traceability, and more are all data-enabled activities that significantly enhance the quality and timeliness of prioritization efforts. By ensuring that all necessary data is accurate, up to date, and readily accessible, organizations can significantly reduce the administrative burden and guesswork that is often associated with strategic planning.
3. Get Stakeholders Involved
All too often, routines around planning cycles and business reviews for significant portfolio investments include massive invite lists across the organization without established accountability for content, required decisions, and the actual decisioning. While this may check the box for keeping people informed, it does not drive effective strategic planning.
Engaging the right stakeholders from day one and establishing their accountabilities throughout the initiatives investment lifecycle is crucial for the success of a continuous planning cycle. It brings the right information and insights to the table and the right people to that table to make critical decisions to drive investments forward.
Decision-makers must be aware, engaged, and accountable for the planning process to be effective. Without transparency and actionable information, strategic planning devolves into mere reporting and administrative overhead, undermining planning efforts at every level of the organization.
4. Drive Tooling and Automation
Technology is vital for the success of continuous strategic planning. It consolidates various data sources (organizational goals, program/project data, business cases, ROI measures, risk data, financial data, resource data, vendor data, and software/hardware data) to create a comprehensive view of the portfolio. Prioritizing strong data mapping, reporting, automation, and real-time availability reduces manual interventions and enables continuous planning.
One major challenge your organization may face when implementing continuous strategy cycles is the administrative lift associated with pulling together reporting, updates, and other inputs for strategic planning. Many companies find this process time-consuming, making continuous planning seem daunting and, in many cases, unattainable.
The solution lies in using technology solutions for automating and maintaining data and updates on an established cycle. By integrating these processes into the operational routine, planning becomes less burdensome for stakeholders and execution teams. By overcoming time and capacity constraints, organizations can engage in more frequent and effective strategic planning.
Building and managing effective and scalable continuous strategic planning cycles is essential for organizational agility and success. By starting with the business impact, prioritizing data transparency, involving key stakeholders, and leveraging technology solutions, organizations can overcome common challenges and make informed, timely decisions. These strategies ensure that continuous strategic planning becomes an integral part of the organizational routine, driving long-term success and maintaining alignment with business goals and market conditions.
Ready to Drive ROI through Continuous Planning?
At Q2 Strategies, we are experts in helping businesses transform strategic planning to realize continuous prioritization aligned with current demand. Ensure that your organization remains agile and get the most out of your strategic investments by connecting with us today.