Strategic and Operational Planning
An integrated approach to optimizing the ordinary, operational planning enhances the effectiveness of the strategic plan by incorporating a toolkit that improves your organization’s chances for extraordinary success.
The Challenge:
The senior leadership team is gathering to examine their results and plan for the next year’s growth. They see some success but are drowning in projects that require resources, time and funds or they are behind projections and frustrated. You review the strategic plan and are tempted to just push onward. Why not just save the time and money for that planning session and dive back into executing the existing plan rather than develop a stronger plan – a comprehensive, integrated plan designed to support the overall extraordinary performance of your organization?
The O2 Solution:
Strategic and operational planning are linked processes, which should be designed to inform and support one another for effective management and overall performance improvement, whether you are a for profit business or a non-profit organization.
Drawn directly from the organization’s business plans, it aligns goals to strategies and strategies to tactical blueprints that ensure the attainment of the organization’s goals. It contains detailed activities, assigned resources and milestones that form the basis of an annual operating budget. When the operational plan is missing, the senior team is deprived of a thorough understanding of not only what got them to this point, but also, a clear blueprint for the future.
Our operational experts guide clients in the development of their priorities for improving processes, increasing productivity, and decreasing risk. We facilitate planning sessions and use a proven process to provide information to make informed decisions and deliver toolkits for achieving the organization’s goals. During the engagement we utilize the tools best suited to our client’s situation, such as: expert facilitation, SWOT and GAP analyses, and logic models. We holistically examine your current state, including the culture, the corporate documents, the successes and failures and the existing planning process. We discuss the key stakeholders and make recommendations for the inclusion of key individuals into the process, openly and honestly creating the blueprint for the desired future state. We develop a framework that is presented for agreement on every aspect of the planning engagement. Our goal is to deliver an operational toolkit that establishes not only the “what to do”, but also, the “how to do it”, instilling the team with the confidence, accountability, and measurements necessary to successfully implement the plan.