Summary:
Interesting article on balancing creativity and skill competence in the area of strategic planning. The author suggests the following: – many companies are turning away from their strategic planning to focus on short-term issues. His prediction is that this will lead to negative outcomes. This raises an interesting prespective on what America needs to do to recover from the current recession.
The author gives several examples starting with the entertainment and travel industry. He emphasizes the term competency-based strategic, but needs to develop the concept further. It is unclear exactly what he means.
Here’s an example from the blog:
“Despite what people might tell you, strategic planning is an art. As with other arts, you can do better with good training and tools, but at the end of the day, there is no replacement for skill and experience.
In times of economic turmoil – or even just turmoil in a specific industry – many companies turn away from their strategic planning to focus on short-term issues. In many cases this is warranted – your course may not be as important if the ship is sinking – but in far more cases, this departure can lead to bad strategy and failure.”
Article link http://simplifiedstrategicplanning.blogspot.com/2009/10/state-of-art.html
For more information about strategic-planning software, go to www.managepro.com/stratplan.html
Summary:
In the article, the author talks about his book Brainzooming. He offers advice to help companies come up with a strategic plan. He illustrates this with an example of how bringing in new perspectives can get your people thinking about strategic planning.
Article Quote:
“A critical component of a successful strategic plan is a well-established strategy foundation – a compilation of information and intelligence covering your industry, global markets, customers, and the environment. Particularly relevant this year is the need to produce an accurate economic forecast with meaning and relevance for the business. And given the uncertainty surrounding the global economy, this can be a daunting task.”
Link: http://brainzooming.blogspot.com/2009/11/getting-ready-for-2010-strategy.html
Strategic planning is, of course, important and every organization needs a goal to work towards. However, once you come up with the strategy, it needs to be put into action.
What often happens is that high level initiatives don’t get broken down into manageable tasks that can be easily digested. If you aren’t using a strategic planning technology, then you probably aren’t communicating effectively to everyone in the organization.
The strategic plan needs to be easily managed through to-do lists and emails so that through our day-to-day projects, the plan is being implemented. Putting everyone on the same page, so to speak, will allow you to translate important objectives.
For more information on strategic planning, see http://www.managepro.com/executestratplan.html
Tonya Welch
ManagePro.com
Summary:
Craig Schiff has defined the essence of BPM by combining the recent history of business performance management with current trends as we head into 2010 . Although BPM has evolved a great deal over the last five years, Shiff asserts that there are still many aspects that remain the same. Budgeting, planning, forecasting and strategic planning are still part of the core foundation, and performance dashboards displaying scorecards containing an organization’s key performance indicators are still one of the main ways BPM data is made available for decision making. Even though BPM has grown significantly beyond its humble beginnings, some in finance and IT still view it as budgeting and/or dashboards.
Schiff takes a look at what’s new with BPM and how these applications effect changes in the way organizations conduct business. Growing beyond the financial construct, it has become the primary front-office strategic decision-making tool. Newer aspects include financial reporting, profitability analysis and optimization, risk reduction and operational analytics. This new, comprehensive business performance management has become a mission-critical initiative for many companies.
Article Quote:
“Five years ago BPM was primarily focused on addressing the budgeting and planning needs of the finance department. For information technology (IT), business performance management meant graphically displaying information from a data warehouse in a performance dashboard. While BPM has grown significantly beyond its humble beginnings, some in finance and IT still view it as budgeting and/or dashboards.”
Article Link: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/12282
As a tough economy accelerates the focus on effective business performance management, taking a look at efficient management software becomes critical. A strategic management system that incorporates tracking progress, goals and individuals responsible for activities provides management with greater control over all business operations.
For more on management software, see http://www.managepro.com/management.html.