In order to stay competitive, today’s executives are being forced to rethink the way they do business and, once again, strategy is the focal point in the quest for higher revenues and profits. Fortunately, there is a new generation of business strategists eager to help companies pursue innovative ways to develop new products, expand existing businesses, and create the markets of tomorrow.
Strategic planning is a top-management responsibility for defining and articulating the vision, mission, goals, and expectations of a company and then ensuring that the people, processes, and actions of the entire organization are defined, aligned, and integrated to achieve them. This means channeling an organization’s energy to be more focused and efficient, and ensuring that the organization can adjust direction in response to changes within the marketplace. To summarize, strategic planning is a disciplined process-based effort that will formulate creative ideas, decisions, and actions based on innovations that will mold what an organization is and what it does, emphasizing the organization’s success into the future.
Being strategic means being clear about the organization's objectives, being aware of the organization's resources, and incorporating both into the organization’s formula for responding to marketplace pressures. The process is strategic because it involves analyzing current and future conditions and developing a reaction to the possibility of shifting circumstances in its environment. Building a business strategy requires deliberation and forethought to establish goals and objectives (i.e., choosing a desired future) and the development of an approach to achieve them. It also requires discipline, order, and precision to remain motivated and productive. And, in order to achieve and sustain success, strategists must examine the organization’s history, gather and incorporate information about the present, anticipate the future, and test assumptions. Strategic planning implies that some organizational decisions and actions are more critical than others, meaning much of the strategy relies on making tough decisions and prioritizing what is most important. Accordingly, choices must be made in order of precedence about what to do, why to do it, and how it must be done.
Executing strategy is the new Burning Platform in business today. It is estimated that less than 10% of formulated strategies are effectively executed. In fact, 85% of management teams spend less than one hour per month working on strategic issues, and only 5% of front-line employees know or understand their organization’s strategy.
Process-based strategic planning encompasses all of the typical strategy tools, while enhancing the robustness of the planning and execution cycle in numerous ways:
The heartbeat of a Strategy Focused Organization is process-based planning. This lays the foundation for building organizational focus on their established goals resulting in faster improvements to operating effectiveness and efficiency. It is also important to remember that strategies exist and must be seamlessly integrated throughout the organization — from the business as a whole (or group of businesses) to individual components working within it.
Corporate Strategy – meeting stakeholder expectations is the objective of any business. This is crucial because business operations are heavily influenced by investors who have a significant impact on strategic decision-making throughout the business. Corporate strategy is often stated explicitly in a mission statement.
Business Unit Strategy– is concerned more with how a business performs and competes within its market. This includes strategic decisions about choice of products, meeting needs of customers, gaining advantage over competitors, exploiting or creating new opportunities, etc.
Operational Strategy – focuses on issues of resources, processes, people etc. and involves how each part of the business is organized and the deliverance of corporate unit-level business strategic direction.
Thomas Group delivers and successfully implements a process-based strategic program for your organization using the following approach.
In this phase, Thomas Group reviews key documents and conducts individual and small group interviews to understand:
This phase requires three to six weeks depending on the size of the organization and number of key locations.
Thomas Group uses the output of its assessment to create a customized Strategy Workshop for the client. The purpose of the workshop is to gain executive alignment on, and commitment to:
Development of a customized workshop typically requires two to three weeks, depending on the output of the assessment.
In this phase, Thomas Group works collaboratively with the client to address and answer the key strategic questions identified during the workshop. The Thomas Group toolkit incorporates a wide range of strategy development tools that are selectively brought to bear, as appropriate, based on the specific questions to be answered. This phase concludes with a second workshop, the purpose of which is to confirm the key strategic decisions and launch the execution phase.
Timeline for this phase varies, depending on the number and nature of the specific questions to be answered.
The purpose of the Execution Architecture phase is to answer two questions:
In addressing what needs to change, most companies tend to focus on product and/or organizational change. While these are certainly important, Thomas Group also helps the client understand where the operational capabilities of core business processes need to be enhanced to support new strategies.
The structure and management process (the How) to lead a major change initiative are critical. Thomas Group brings 25 years of experience in creating highly effective, cross-functional architectures to deliver maximum performance improvement as rapidly as possible.
The architecture phase normally requires two to four weeks.
During the actual execution phase, Thomas Group works with the client to translate the Architecture into a detailed roadmap for change, and then assists the client in implementing that roadmap.
Thomas Group plays a critical role in execution by:
Timeline for this phase varies, depending on scope.
Strategy implementation is most often the hardest part of the program. Once a strategy has been developed, the challenge is to translate it into action.
Thomas Group delivers process-based strategic outcomes via cultural change and process improvements. Our experts design and deploy strategic planning and culture change initiatives to solve urgent and complex client business dilemmas. Weintegrate and deploy the most relevant improvement methods, tools, and techniques including our proprietary methodology, Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, Total Cycle Time, and Balanced Scorecard among many others.
We bring innovation, intuition, reasoning skills, sound judgment, and experience across an expanse of industries to deliver dramatic improvements in operating results and Return on Investment that consistently exceeds our clients’ expectations. In the collaborative role, Thomas Group offers objectivity and neutrality in partnering with clients. Sometimes it takes an outsider to ask the hard questions, and a skilled facilitator to help resolve disagreements about important issues, as well as eliminate or minimize potential conflicts in a constructive way.