POWERFUL STRATEGIC PLANS—EVEN DURING DIFFICULT TIMES

In these tough economic times, organizations are focusing on those few things that are truly critical to success and most likely to impact the bottom line. To support these priorities, many Communications and HR departments are stringently prioritizing to align with the needs of the business. An effective way to make sure your work adds the greatest value to the business is by developing a comprehensive strategic plan.

A good strategic plan will help you pinpoint your priorities, develop a roadmap for achieving your goals, and measure your results. As the graphic below shows, there are four key steps that should be addressed, along with a number of activities and tools that support each one.

Assess the Landscape

The first step in the strategic planning process is to ensure you have all the information you need to develop the strategy. Take a look at what's happening externally your industry, as well as in the economic, cultural, and technological arenas that could impact your strategy. Then, conduct a needs assessment internally to ensure that you understand the strategy and objectives of the business for the next 12 to 18 months and how your strategy can support it.

It's also important to stay current in the best practices in your field. One way to do this is to look at what other organizations are doing to address similar issues. For example, one of our clients in the pharmaceutical industry was developing a communication strategy for their field sales force. To ensure that they had included the most powerful objectives and activities for the strategy, they interviewed communications leaders at several other pharmaceutical companies to gather their internal best practices in sales communication. The data gathered in this benchmarking study was invaluable for developing the sales communication strategy and enhancing credibility with internal leadership.

After closely reviewing what's happening in these areas, it's time to analyze your own department and determine how best to leverage your strengths, seize opportunities, and address weaknesses and threats. All of this information will help you then determine your general path forward and identify one to three broad areas of focus, which leads to the next step.

Develop the Roadmap

Based on the data you've gathered in the assessment phase, it's time to create your end state for the next 12 to 18 months and conduct a gap analysis to determine the distance between where you are now and this desired state. Then you can develop your communication objectives for the year and test each one to ensure that it's realistic, relevant, and measurable.

Next, define your tactics and activities for each objective. You may find that your list of activities is too large for the resources you have. One global hospitality organization we worked with addressed this by mapping each of its activities against two criteria: the level of business impact it would have, and the number of resources required to accomplish it. Activities that would have greater business impact and require fewer resources became the organization's top priorities, while activities with lesser business impact and/or required greater resources were eliminated from the list.

It's also critical to identify any potential obstacles to achieving your strategy and ensure that your plan addresses each of them. Finally, develop a metrics strategy that identifies how you will measure success.

Align Leaders

Obtaining leadership support and buy-in is critical for your strategy to gain traction. You may want identify executive sponsors who can help you champion the strategy, clearly define the role you want them to play in the strategy, and develop a plan to ensure that all leaders are on board with your strategy.

Execute the Strategy

We will devote a future newsletter to strategy execution, so we'll just touch on it briefly here. This step includes conducting a stakeholder analysis to ensure that you address the needs of those groups who will be impacted by, or have the greatest impact on, your strategy. You'll also want to create and manage a detailed project plan, and develop a communication and/or engagement strategy to move stakeholders from goals to actions required to achieve the strategy.

Keep in mind that developing a strategic plan is a process, not a one-time event, and you will likely need to make adjustments as internal and external factors shift. But investing the time and effort up front to develop a sound strategic plan will pay off tremendously as you measure your success going forward, especially during tough times.