Your strategic planning probably isn’t charting a true path to help the business achieve goals and objectives
Annual planning has changed in the last few years. It may even be referred to as quarterly planning because businesses are planning with the awareness that plans need to be reviewed and adjusted on a regular basis to reflect changing circumstances. It’s very different from the old approach of a management offsite meeting spread over two or three days where all the project proposals for the year were presented, discussed, and eventually approved. Or is it?
A broken approach to planning
In practical terms has that much actually changed? In most businesses, leaders still determine the goals and objectives for the next fiscal year, and then department heads are tasked with developing projects to deliver those goals. At the departmental level, proposals are developed based on a predetermined list of things that the business area wants to deliver, with those ideas retrofitted to the goals to justify their existence.
Whether those projects are ultimately approved will still come down to which ones a department head strategically support and how well they can sell the benefits of each project to colleagues and executives. A quarterly planning approach simply means they have to justify those decisions more frequently than they did before.
This is a fundamentally broken approach to planning. It starts at the bottom – with tactical problems and challenges that have been identified in each business area. While those initiatives may well contribute to the overall goals and objectives of the business, there is little to no consideration of whether they are the projects that would make the biggest contribution. And there is certainly no thought of giving back some of the budget allocation if another department is capable of generating a bigger return on investment.
A better approach to planning
A better approach, in fact the only approach that can succeed in today’s world, is a true top-down strategic and continuous approach to planning. Executives must not only set the goals and objectives. They must identify the projects that they want to invest in to deliver those goals. It is leadership’s responsibility to assign the investment dollars to initiatives that they feel will generate the return they need. This is the only way they can be effective stewards of organizational performance.
Executives must manage those investments as a portfolio, where the performance of the whole is more important than the performance of individual projects--and where those projects can, and will, be sacrificed for the good of the business if required. They must adapt their plans – and investments– in response to an ever-changing operating environment, leveraging new opportunities and emerging technologies while responding to threats to their ability to deliver.
Next steps
At ServiceNow we are committed to helping businesses embrace modern ways of working, and we have partnered with global project and portfolio delivery expert Andy Jordan and Doug Page (ServiceNow ITBM Sr. Principal Product Manager) to deliver a webinar on October 22nd that explores in more depth the concept of strategic and continuous planning. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to improve your ability to deliver, register now.
