There's a lot of talk about strategic planning in companies and how important it is for their development. In the business world, planning is synonymous with knowledge. However, brilliant plan proposals barely make it from development to execution.

In addition to flawless planning, it's necessary to ensure that everything proposed is followed and achieved with the same impact as the initial plan. We often see the difficulty people have in executing strategic planning, and how much this needs to be trained and understood in order to achieve success. Excellent ideas are useless if you don't know how to make them a reality, without them remaining mere drafts. However, it's crucial to establish and strictly adhere to an execution discipline to obtain significant results.

Goal deployment is the beginning of management and is essential for building aligned solutions defined by excellent administration. A good strategic plan should be one that leaders can rely on to achieve proposed objectives, and this is only possible through constant evaluation of how its elements are being executed. This ensures that the entire organization works cohesively and that everyone understands their personal contribution to the proposed strategic plan.

How to make business strategic planning work?

Strategy x Goals

First, it is necessary to know the company's objectives and where it aims to go. More than knowing, it is essential to publicize this information to the entire organization, in a way that awakens in employees the desire to be part of this plan.

One of the biggest reasons for inaction occurs because “new strategies” are not actually strategies, they are goals. A goal simply states what the company wishes to achieve in the medium and long term. To achieve it, you need a path, and that's where strategic planning comes in.

Many strategic plans are not implemented because they do not represent a set of clear choices, despite the efforts of the team involved. Instead of spending so much time explaining the possible options to be chosen within the plan, it is better to start focusing on explaining the logic behind it. There are guides to assist in strategic development, but few talk about how to execute it. The difficulty in achieving excellence in execution is, most of the time, a major obstacle.

All strategic planning goes through fundamental stages for the desired success. They can be broken down, analyzed, and followed separately, but in any case, we can classify four essential stages for efficient strategic planning:

1. Scenario Analysis

2. Definition of objectives

3. Definition of strategies

4. Action Plan Creation

If followed with discipline, using a methodology of proven efficiency – such as the four steps presented here – and aligning the company's perspectives with its purpose, there is no doubt that success will be achieved in executing the proposed strategic planning. Other efficient management models that can be applied are BSC and GPD:

– BSC (Balanced Scorecard): methodology focused on evaluating and improving business performance. It is a tool that aims to measure and manage company performance based on four perspectives: financial, customers (external and internal), processes, and organizational growth.
– GPD (Management by Objectives/Guidelines): An alternative for optimizing strategy implementation. It is a planning system that defines the organization's annual objectives/guidelines, considering the organization's philosophy and breaking down the plan through the hierarchy down to the operational level.

Recommendations

For the execution of strategic planning, companies must promote coordination between units and develop efficiency in adapting to changes in market conditions.

Reframing the execution in these terms can help managers identify why it is stagnated. Armed with a broader understanding, they can avoid pitfalls and stay focused on the most important factors for bringing favorable results to strategic planning and its execution.

A complete strategic plan requires much more effort and dedication than we normally imagine, but if done with quality, there will certainly be no more failures in its implementation.