Time to Change up Strategic Planning?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Strategy  

I’m going to advocate for the need to change how organizations approach strategic planning. That may sound odd, because over the last few years, organizations have made a lot of changes with how they approach strategic planning. But I don’t think that things have gone far enough yet.

To explain, let’s start by going backward a bit.

From annual to adaptive…sort of
Back when I first started getting involved with planning, the process was very much annual. Sometime around the start of the third quarter of the current business cycle, we would be told what the priorities for the next year would be and were asked to develop proposals for projects to deliver on those priorities. Internally to our department, we would review and assess all of the proposals and determine which ones we would actually submit for approval.

The business cases would be developed and refined, and then there was a multi-day planning meeting to review all of the proposals from across the organization and make the case for why our initiatives should be approved. That process wrapped up with prioritizing all work, determining where the cutoff would be, subject to budget approval.

Then a few weeks later we got confirmation of which projects we were expected to deliver, usually with a reduced overall budget for them because executives assumed that all cost numbers were padded (…

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