Strategic Planning Foundations

By: Mike Figliuolo

Kelby Schwender
Dr. Plummer
BA 422W - Strategic Business Planning
Before You Begin Planning
 ● A Strategic plan, essentially, explains what your

Understanding the organization stands for. Strategic plan describes

the type of market that your business competes
in and how you compete in this market. Strategic
principles of strategic planning will help you define goals for your
company that you pursue and how you will go
planning ●
about achieving those goals.
Strategic planning provides focus
● There are three principles of strategic planning:
1. Set a clear direction and stay in your lave
2. Say no to distractions
3. Make sure you diversify your bets
 ● Lots of time and energy go into strategic
planning and it is essentially a high resource type
Avoiding major ●
of exercise for companies
There are three things a company can watch for

strategic planning when trying to avoid major strategic planning

risks:
1. Initiative proliferation
risks 2. Thinking to small
3. Thinking to big
● When a company is strategic planning they must
make sure they set a direction for the company,
pursue initiatives, add value to the company and
reach the desired destination without too much
risk and hassel
 ● There are six steps to ensure that the strategic
planning process of a company is completed
Strategic planning efficiently and effectively
1. Set a direction and stay in that lane
process: Overview 2. Define strategic filters
3. Say no to any and all distractions
4. Draw a line- identify your top and bottom
initiatives and resource them appropriately
5. Diversify the portfolio of your initiatives
6. Executive your strategic plan
● Remember to work with your initiatives that are
“above” the line and that you have resources for
Strategic planning ● A company must remember that even though as
a team you are strategically planning, individuals

process: Tactical are still going to be off doing their own work but
that is OK because later the team will come back
together to work on the “vision, mission, and
needs guiding principles”
○ This process may happen multiple times
during the strategic planning process
Defining the Strategic Environment
 ● To begin the strategic planning process,
businesses need to make sure they assess the
marketing in which they will competing in
● According to Dr. Michael Porter “there is a set of
Assessing the market five forces to evaluate all the different dynamics
that can affect your business which will in turn
allow you to be able to identify where the major
threats and opportunities are that your business
faces”
1. “Look at competitive rivalry”
2. “Look at the threats of new entry”
3. “Look at the threat of substitution”
4. “Evaluate buyer power”
5. “Look at supplier power”
 ● SWOT = Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities,
and Threats
Conduct a SWOT ○ Strength & Weakness = These are
typically in your business, capabilities that
analysis your business may have or do not have
○ Opportunities & Threats = These can
either be internal or external “market-
facing opportunities”
● A SWOT analysis is essential where your
business team will brainstorm and discuss ideas
Extracting insight
● Once a SWOT analysis has been conducted, a
from a SWOT business should now sit down and reevaluate and
analyze the ideas and discussions that were had.
analysis This is the time to “synthesize ideas and look for
major themes that emerge from the SWOT
analysis.
Setting Your Strategic Direction
 ● One of the steps in the strategic planning process
is to set a direction for the business and when
setting the direction there are four elements to

Defining the direction help with doing so:

1. Articulate the businesses mission
2. Articulate the businesses vision
3. Articulate the businesses guiding
principles
4. Articulate the businesses goals
● Following these four elements and setting a
direction for the business allows for clarify as to
where the business will be in the future, near or
far
 ● A business must articulate the mission
Creating a mission ● Essentially a mission is by the business exists
● Ultimately a mission should “be a cultural
statement reflection of the businesses values, beliefs, and
the philosophy of the business”
● A mission must be well organized,
understandable, brief, and clear; it should make
people excited
 Defining the ● A business must articulate a vision
● Essentially a vision is a clear image of where you
organizational vision want be as a business in the coming years (3-5
years)
● A vision should get people in the business and
outside of the business excited for what is to
come
 ● Refining the mission and vision of the business is an
essential part in setting the direction of the business;
this is where the real planning comes
● As Mike Figliuolo states:
○ “Get the right people into the room. Create
another brainstorming session. Pass out to
Refining the mission everyone what exists today. Have individuals
identify things that they like and don't like
and vision about what currently is in place. Pass out the
SWOT analysis and Porter’s five forces so
individuals can understand the ricks,
opportunities, and threats of the business. Now
continue to have in depth conversations as to
what can happen next for the business.”
○ “So when you go through this exercise, just
capture all the ideas, good, bad and ugly, then
step back, look for the synthesis, look for the
common themes, and hammer it out into a
clear, crisp, compelling vision and mission
statement.”
 ● Guiding principles essentially dictates how you
Guiding principles ●
want the business to behave at all times
When speaking of setting goals for a business it
and goals means that you are going to set out those metrics
that after years pass will allow your business to
look back and say “yes, we have achieved these
goals”
● By the business articulating the principles and
goals, the business has the ability to drive the
company in the right direction
Determining How You’ll Compete
 ● A business needs to determine whether they will
Core competencies ●
compete or not
It is essential that a business look at and
understand their core competencies; these are
things that business is good at
○ “Quality of product, ability to innovate,
efficiency in your supply chain, strength of
your brands, technology infrastructure”
 ● Once a business has identified their core
competencies, it should move to looking at the
initiatives that they are thinking of pursuing and
determine what their approach will look like
● Reminder, a businesses core competency “is the
Focusing with core quality of their product from low to high in terms
of the relevance of the competency in whatever

competencies ●
initiative they are thinking about pursuing”
“As you look at your organization’s core
competencies and understand what you’re great
at, you can then use that to look at any
opportunity you’re thinking about pursuing, be it
a new product, a new market, or a new initiative,
and plotting on this grid to determine what your
initial approach to that opportunity should be.
And that will then help you prioritize the
initiatives you think about pursuing, and the ones
that you don’t.”
Evaluating and Prioritizing Opportunities
 ● In order to identify a businesses high- and low-
Understanding priority initiatives, there must be “a common set
of criteria that everyone across the organization
strategic filters is going to use to conduct the evaluations;” these
are strategic filters
● A business should create a consistent set of
filters because this allows for companies to
quickly evaluate their initiatives and help the
company stay on the path that they desire to
reach their goals.
 ● When creating your strategic filters, the process
to do so is similar in the way that you create your
businesses vision and mission
● “Look at your vision, your mission you goals and
your guiding principles because those are all
Creating strategic going to be filters that help keep you going in the
right direction.”

filters ● Look for quantitative and quantitative filters;

filters can either be hard or soft
● “Whittle it down to those six to 10 themes, and
start with them as your initial set of strategic
filters for evaluating your list of initiatives”

● “A hard filter is if the initiative passes that filter, it stays in the

process. If it fails, it is immediately dead”
● “A soft filter is something where you’re evaluating it from a low to
a high scale. And you're determining if it's high on that filter, it's
highly attractive, and if it's low, it's just going to move it down on
the priority list.”
 ● When a company is getting ready to apply the
strategic filters it is best for leaders to assign
“homework” to employees so the strategic
Applying strategic planning process can continue on
● “As you ask your people to apply the strategic
filters filters, give them the best understanding you can
of what the filter means, assign very specific
initiatives for them to evaluate. Give them a
deadline to come back with that evaluation, and
make sure they document their rationale. And
when they do so, you'll be well prepared in
future steps to compare all the initiatives in your
portfolio.
 ● When a company is strategic planning it is
Comparing and important to remember that this planning process
is about focus and prioritization. This focus and
prioritizing initiatives prioritization allows your business to properly
allocate very limited resources to the highest
potential initiatives that your business may
pursue
● While a company may start with many
initiatives, during the process it is best to
compare and analyze the businesses initiative
portfolio
 ● Assign initiatives to individuals to conduct deep analysis of high
priority ideas
○ It is suggested that a “homework list is created for the
individuals to do the following (plus some) :
■ Provide a description of what the initiative is
Conducting deep ■ Identify what the value of the proposition is of doing
that project

analysis of high ■ Identify who the customer’s going to be

■ Identify the point of differentiation
■ Identify which competitors this initiative could
priority ideas affect
■ Look at the resources that will be required to
implement this initiative
■ Think about external partners or vendors
■ Take a look at milestones and put together your best
guess for when you’ll have market validation of
your initiative, when you’ll have the indrasture
scoped and built, when you’re going to test itm
when you expect it to launch
■ Define the owner, categorize the opportunity type
■ Identify the market you're going to impact with this
■ Financial analysis
 According to Mike Figliuolo

● “Once you have your priorities and you understand the

resources required, you need to go through an exercise
called "Drawing the Line." And that's saying, "I have a
Initiative finite pool of resources "that I can use. "And when I run
out of those resources, "I should not be pursuing any
prioritization: initiatives "that are below that line." Because it's going to
dilute my efforts and reduce my possibility of success.”
Drawing the line ● “As you look at your prioritization list and you have them
sorted from highest to lowest and you understand the
resources that will be required to pursue that initiative,
work your way down from the top of the list and be
disciplined about stopping when you run out of that
limiting resource so you can focus on your highest priority
initiatives, get them executed successfully, and then move
further down your list.”
Assessing Your Initiative Portfolio
 ● A 2x2 matrix is a tool that can help businesses
prioritize their initiatives
Applying the 2x2 ● A 2x2 matrix is when a business “looks at two
objective functions that the organization has and
matrix plots them against one another, and then place
your initiatives on the grid”
● “As you’re conducting your strategic planning
process, take your initiatives, think about the
objectives that are most important to your
business, plot your initiatives, and that should
help confirm what your priority list is”
 ● When you are trying to drive multiple objective
Creating multiple functions it makes strategic planning a little more
complicated
diversification views ● “Once you have a list of initiatives and you’ve
prioritized them, go back to your strategic
objectives, build some 2x2 matrices, and look at
the portfolio through multiple lenses. And when
you see it unbalanced, spend some time
rebalancing that list of initiatives so you can
drive all your strategic objectives at the same
time”
 ● When businesses are looking over their portfolio
Assessing initiatives of initiatives, they need to think about how does
it change over time because essentially these

over time initiatives are going to get your business where

you want
● “As you look at your portfolio, it’s important to
look beyond this year’s financial impact. You
have to appreciate the role that those smaller
initiatives are going to play in your future, and be
able to prioritize and reallocate resources for the
initiative portfolio to achieve your overall
vision”
Organizing for Success
 ● Once a business has made a prioritization list and
has defined which initiatives they are going to
pursue and in which sequence they will pursue
them, it is now time to allocate resources
● “Once you’ve defined the right organization
structure with the right set of capabilities to
Planning resources pursue that strategy, then you identify your
human resource needs to fill the boxes on that
correct organization chart. When you do resource
planning this way, you’re going to find you’ll
swap out talent, you may move people from one
team to another, you'll identify hiring gaps that
you need to fill, because you need a certain set of
capabilities to deliver on this strategy. And once
you’ve done that, then you can go from aligning
big corporate goals all the way down to
individual goals. And that’s going to help you
make sure that your teams are appropriately
resources”
 ● One way a business can ensure that their
initiatives are complete is by holding people
accountable
● Designate a job to everyone in the business to
help ensure task get done; this also allows
Accountability leaders to hold people accountable for things in
the workplace
● “By establishing clear accountabilities, you’re
able to balance to initiatives across your portfolio
to make sure they get done, and you’re going to
ensure that you get the results that you’re
promising back to the organization as part of the
strategic planning process
 ● Even though the strategic planning process has
multiple steps and can be a lot of strenuous work
a business it needs to be remembered that a
The ongoing business must implement an ongoing evaluation
process so when new ideas come about they can

prioritization process easily be ran through the process, assessed and

put onto the businesses prioritization list.
● “If you put in place this ongoing prioritization
process you’ll find that those strategic filters will
keep your initiatives focused on your overall
strategic goals. And you’re going to be able to
get more ideas done, more quickly because
you're going to focus your resources on the
highest value initiatives”
Running the strategic ● “As you go through the strategic planning
process, that communication, when you bring
planning process people together and send them away, is a key
role that you’re going to play as you run this
process.”
● Communication, meetings, delegating tasks, and
evaluating are very important in this process