Project Management: How to Develop a Strategic Plan



Strategic planning is the process of making short and long term strategies to direct a company towards maintaining and growing business success. Project managers typically oversee complex tasks intended to contribute to strategic planning targets.

Despite good strategic planning, success in project management is difficult to attain. Strategic planning focuses on the future of a company by identifying its organizational needs and availability of capital, setting specific targets for expected business results, and creating an action plan for how to achieve them. The process creates and implements decisions that guide an organization's direction, ensuring that it's adaptable to a changing business environment.

In the end, strategic planning allows a company to take charge of its vision and transform expected results in reality. It highlights the value of project managers who are responsible for project progress or failure and ensuring that an organization is managed as effectively as possible.

Phase 1: Consider the Purpose and Goals of Your Organization
 
This first step is geared towards understanding your company's current business strategy. It's almost difficult to build a good strategic plan without a simple overview of your mission and long term goals. 

Review past and current results to objectively assess your strategic role and decide how to: 
  •  Draw on your strengths.
  •  Counter weaknesses.
  •  Make the most out of chances of growth.
  •  Find coming risks in the future.

Step 2: Assessing Resources and Capabilities

It is extremely important to evaluate the company's resources because it determines how you can implement a successful strategic plan. The strategy will analyze all the assets available, including resources, personnel, and equipment. It will also analyze company strengths and find any gaps in the organization. This helps management to lobby for the form and amount of resources that are needed to achieve the organization's objectives accurately.

Step 3: Strategic Planning

The first two steps will help you set your current business objectives and the strategies you need to achieve them, but how do you focus on short-term goals to achieve your overall goals?

Take the list as a starting point:
  • Set clear and measurable objectives.
  • To stay motivated track the progress of each goal.
  • Remain realistic and set objectives that are difficult but achievable.
  • Ensure that milestones are relevant and helpful to the overall business objectives.
  • Provide a period for each goal to optimize productivity.
This method enables companies to formulate a declaration of vision. Although the future cannot be expected, having a consistent vision within the company can help to establish the prospective outlook for the business.

Step 4: Decide the Strategy for Achieving Business Goals

Once you have set out the mission statement for your company, the next step is to create an action plan. It can be the most critical step within a strategic plan to decide the course of action you must take to meet your short-term objectives and will directly affect the time it takes to achieve your business goals.

The action plan will identify the short-term objectives that need to be accomplished to meet each of the business goals, and clearly explain how to budget time, human resources, and finances. The strategy would ensure that each person will be kept accountable for their contribution to achieving the overall objectives.

If it is discovered at this stage that strategic planning has been inappropriately applied, then the business strategy will need to be further re-analyzed. The survey '2018 PMI Pulse of the Profession' found that 82 percent of project managers believe it is highly necessary to integrate the lessons learned from unsuccessful plan execution back into the design of a plan to ensure that the company remains successful for the next three years.

Step 5: Ensuring the Success of The Strategy

It's important to recognize that a strategic plan isn't in stone. Assuming the plan is a continuous ongoing task, or a more useful "running, breathing document." It is important to review it periodically and make changes when required to ensure the plan continues to work when expected.
 
A strategic plan's success depends on the persons and structures involved in its development. It is also necessary to include the right people in the planning process and to express the company's goals as well as how they are to be accomplished. To this end, there will be a greater sense of transparency and the lessons gained from the implementation of strategic plans should be integrated into future planning processes, thus constantly redefining the strategy to ensure you continue to work towards achieving your vision and ultimate objectives.

QuickScrum is one of the leading project management software available in the market and offers tools to help the teams streamline the process, enforce best practices, and enhance communication between teams.

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