What are your activities that are considered part of your strategic planning and

management?

Answer: As a future leader, I am starting to craft my strategic plan. The strategic

planning process is about looking forward, outside the immediate future for the
organization, to reach a particular set of goals.
It also involves laying out—step-by-step—how you’re going to get there.
• Prepare for strategic planning.
• Create your strategic plan.
• Put your strategic plan into practice.
1. Prepare for strategic planning.
➢ GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE INVOLVED.
The leader needs the help of a cross-functional team that involves
members of the board or leadership, along with representatives from finance,
human resources, operations, instructions, and any other critical functions.
➢ CREATE A REASONABLE TIMELINE.
You need to work out a timeline in which you can complete your strategic
plan and move through the process. Reasonable is the key word here, as that
depends on your organization’s maturity level with regard to strategic planning.
➢ GET APPROPRIATE BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR YOUR STRATEGIC
PLAN.
Internal inputs—Do you know if one branch of your school is growing faster
than another? If so, does this mean you’ll focus more energy on the faster
growing area, or shift to help the underperforming areas? These are key
questions you’ll have to assess.
External inputs—You may find that parts of your organization have shifted,
or outside factors are playing a role in where your organization is headed.
➢ ORGANIZE YOUR RAW DATA WITH ONE OF THE FOLLOWING TOOLS.
A SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats. This exercise offers a helpful way to think about and organize your
internal and external data.
What are your organization’s strong points?
What are your organization’s weak points?
Where are your biggest opportunities in the future?
What are the largest threats to your organization?
2. Create Your Strategic Plan
➢ Confirm your mission and vision statements.
Your mission statement describes what your company does and how it is
different from other organizations in your competitive space.
Your vision statement describes a future state of what your organization
wants to achieve over time.
➢ Build out your five-year plan.
• Financial goals— “What financial goals do we have that will
impact our organization?”
• Customer goals— “What things are important to our customers,
which will in turn impact our financial standing?”
• Process goals— “What do we need to do well internally, to meet
our customer goals, that will impact our financial standing?”
 • People (or learning and growth) goals— “What skills, culture, and
capabilities do we need to have in our organization to execute on
the process that would make our customers happy and ultimately
impact our financial standing?”
DEFINE YOUR OBJECTIVES, MEASURES, AND PROJECTS.
The strategic planning frameworks above are all meant, in different
ways, to help you organize your objectives, measures, and projects. So, it’s
critical that these elements are well thought-out and defined.

Here’s how objectives, measures, and projects interact:

You have a high-level goal in mind—your objective. Your measures

answer the question, “How will I know that we’re meeting our goal?” From
there, initiatives, or projects, are put in place to answer the question, “What
actions are we talking to accomplish our goals?”

Now that the strategic vision has created...

• You have a fully defined mission and vision to use as you move
forward with your strategy implementation process.
• You have chosen a strategic framework that will hold your five-year
strategic plan.
• You have defined objectives, measures, and projects, and you
know how they work together.
• You have a graphic representation of your strategic model.

3. Put Your Strategic Plan into Practice

➢ Launch your strategy.
ENSURE THE OFFICE OF STRATEGY MANAGEMENT (OSM) IS PUSHING THINGS
FORWARD.
The Office of Strategy Management is comprised of a group of people
responsible for coordinating strategy implementation. This team isn’t
responsible for doing everything in your strategy, but it should oversee
strategy execution across the organization.

CREATE YOUR INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL STRATEGY COMMUNICATION PLAN.

Internal—Be sure all elements of your strategy—like strategy maps or logic
models—are contained within a larger strategic plan document.
External—You also need to be sure you have a plan for communicating
your strategy outside the organization—with stakeholders

ALIGN YOUR RESOURCES TO YOUR STRATEGY.

In the short term—which would be your next budgeting cycle or
something similar—work to structure the budget around the key components
of your strategy. You don’t need to completely rewire your budget, but you
do need to create direct linkages between how your resources are allocated
and how those efforts support your strategy.

➢ Evaluate your strategy.

 CREATE REPORTS TO HIGHLIGHT YOUR RESULTS.
The report should highlight progress on your measures and projects, and
how those link to your objectives. The point is to show how all these elements
fit together and relate to the strategic plan as a whole.

HOLD REGULAR STRATEGY MEETINGS.

The best way to report on strategy progress is to hold a quarterly or
monthly review meeting with the leadership team.

DEPLOY STRATEGY REPORTING SOFTWARE

To make strategy execution work, reporting is unavoidable. While you
might be able to track your first strategy meeting in Excel or give your first
presentation via PowerPoint, you’ll quickly realize you need some kind of
software to track the continuous gathering of data, update your projects,
and keep your leadership team on the same page.

SONNY V. MATIAS
PhD Educational Leadership and Management