A lot of energy goes into creating a strategic plan — hours spent conducting research, analyzing data, and outlining action plans. Plus, numerous meetings with stakeholders and systems were put in place to ensure everyone is ready to carry out their tasks. It’s a time-intensive process that deserves a follow-up to ensure it remains relevant and impactful. Yet, for many businesses, their strategic plan is treated as something static, a relic of where your organization was a year ago.
Regular evaluation of your plan allows you to identify potential roadblocks early on, course-correct when necessary, and ensure your plan remains relevant and effective, even during turbulence. Evaluating your strategic plan allows you to make informed decisions with confidence and lead your business toward long-term success.
Why You Should Be Evaluating Your Strategic Plan
Carrying out regular strategic plan evaluations is a good habit to get into. It strengthens your overall strategy in a number of ways:
- Identify and address roadblocks early: Evaluation allows you to uncover potential roadblocks hindering progress toward your goals. Are market trends shifting, or have competitor strategies changed? Catching these things early allows you to adapt your approach before these obstacles derail your success.
- Maximize resource allocation: Are you making the best use of your resources? Evaluation helps you identify areas where your plan isn’t delivering the desired results so that you may redirect resources toward more promising initiatives.
- Boost confidence in decision-making: A well-evaluated plan provides the foundations for data-driven decision-making. Knowing your plan is current and reflects market realities fosters confidence and reduces the risk of costly missteps.
- Promotes innovation: Evaluation isn’t just about identifying roadblocks — it’s an opportunity to discover new opportunities and areas in which to innovate. Through your analysis you might uncover unforeseen gaps or underutilized resources. This sparks creative thinking and allows you to refine your strategic approach, fostering a culture of innovation that propels your business forward.
7 Steps for a Successful Strategy Evaluation Process
There are a few steps to consider when designing a process of strategy evaluation to ensure you’re measuring performance for continuous improvement. Strategic evaluation may differ from organization to organization, but here is a template of what your evaluation framework should look like.
1. Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics
This typically happens during the strategic planning process. KPIs, like “increased market share,” act as quantifiable measures reflecting your strategic goals. Metrics, such as “sales growth by region,” provide the detailed data points that feed into your KPIs. Having these defined upfront ensures your evaluation focuses on the data that truly matters.
2. Gather Your Data Regularly
You cannot evaluate your strategy unless you’re collecting updates from across your organization regularly. We recommend gathering monthly updates and committing to them as an integral part of your strategic management process. Doing this ensures that you can take a monthly snapshot of your progress and that you’ve got enough reliable data to lean on when measuring your organizational performance.
3. Use Qualitative and Quantitative Data
To obtain a well-rounded perspective of your strategy implementation, you need to consider more than just numerical, quantitative data. Metrics like sales figures and website traffic provide a measurable view of progress, but qualitative data adds depth and context. This can include customer satisfaction surveys, employee interviews, or focus groups. Imagine a scenario where website traffic dips. Quantitative data tells you “what” happened, but qualitative data might reveal “why” — customer dissatisfaction with a new product launch, for example. By combining both data types, you gain a holistic understanding of your plan’s effectiveness.
4. Evaluate Your Strategy Annually
Although you’re collecting updates every month and keeping an eye on your progress and any roadblocks that may appear, your full-blown strategy evaluation happens every year. After 12 monthly check-ins, you’re in a great position to carry out a thorough strategic analysis and understand just how you’ve performed.
5. Develop Actionable Steps and Strategic Decisions
Evaluation doesn’t stop at analysis. It’s about turning those insights into actionable steps. After analyzing your data, translate your findings into concrete recommendations for strategic decisions. This could involve tweaking resource allocation, carrying out corrective action on failing strategy areas, or adjusting timelines for specific goals.
6. Communicate Your Findings
Clearly communicate your findings to relevant stakeholders — both external and internal. Use data visualization like charts and graphs to make your insights clear and easy to understand. Tailor your message to each audience segment. Your key decision-makers should be able to grasp the big picture, and your team members must understand how their roles contribute to the actual results. Transparent communication fosters buy-in and ensures everyone is aligned toward achieving your strategic goals.
7. Be Patient
Finally, it’s important to give new strategies time before changing direction or putting a pin in it altogether. A strategy is developed with the future in mind and not where we hope to be three months from strategy formulation. Be patient and wait until the full reporting period has elapsed before you start to consider the feasibility of shifting benchmarks or pivoting your plan.
Avoid This One Common Strategy Evaluation Pitfall
A big part of strategy evaluation takes place during strategy management meetings. The aim of these meetings is supposedly to discuss findings and make recommendations on ways forward. All too often, however, most of the time is wasted on reviewing results instead of discussing solutions. This is because people would not have reviewed the insights beforehand.
Your strategy evaluation meetings should follow a 90/10 ratio instead, where 10% of the time is spent on presenting the findings, and 90% is dedicated to finding solutions. To do this, distribute important information beforehand so attendees arrive prepared with ideas. Shift the discussion from “What’s wrong?” to “How can we fix it?” by encouraging creative solutions.
Streamline Your Strategic Evaluation Process with AchieveIt
AchieveIt enhances your strategic process from formulation to evaluation and beyond. It streamlines the update-collection process, ensuring better accountability and ownership. It helps visualize the data collected from your update process, and it uses all of this to help you achieve more efficient strategic evaluation meetings.
AchieveIt also sends out emails with updates and meeting reminders and sends out strategy reports prior to management meetings. Think of it as working in the background to support your strategic calendar.
If you want to learn more about how AchieveIt can help you master your strategy evaluation process, contact our team today.
