The Strategic Planning Test – Part 2

Earlier this year we invited you to assess your readiness for strategic planning by answering 5 questions posed in our February 18 blog.

We’ll provide a link to those original questions below, but first, give some thought to these additional queries:

Is your firm committed to all three of the main steps of strategic planning? These are: brainstorming the vision, creating goals to achieve the vision and implementation. If your firm is not committed to all three steps, it’s not going to work.

Countless firms produce exquisitely crafted vision statements at their partner retreats. And that’s where it stops. The partners return to the office and it’s business as usual: nothing gets accomplished because the firm didn’t take the second step: Create a short list of high impact goals and action steps for each partner to accomplish the vision.

If your firm is not committed to creating written goals and monitoring progress, then strategic planning brainstorming will be a waste of time.

Can your firm create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bounded) goals? If it’s not crystal clear how you will measure the achievement of a goal, then it’s unlikely the goal will be achieved. If your partners don’t know how to write SMART goals, seek help from people who do.

Does the firm know its limitations? Short beats long every time. It’s common for firms –especially those who are new to strategic planning – to create too many goals. When this happens, the partners feel overwhelmed, get discouraged and quit. Identify a small number of high impact goals and attack them with a vengeance.

Do the partners have both the necessary time and support to work on strategic planning goals? What are their average billable hours? If it’s too high (say, over 1,400), that tells me that the partners are so busy doing client work that there is no way they will have time to work on strategic planning goals.

Even when billable hours are lower than 1,200 hours, strategic planning may still be an impossible dream for many firms. How do partners with full client bases find the time to implement strategic plan goals? The presence of an effective management and support structure is key. A partner will need to delegate client work to staff and have the assistance of professional admin staff (COO, marketing and HR directors, etc.) to support efforts to implement goals.

If you want to doom a strategic plan, burden busy client service partners with lots of strategic planning goals without giving them support.

Is someone watching? The firm must monitor progress for implementation to succeed. If someone creates a goal on January 1 and no one says a word to this person about their goals until December 31, it is unlikely that the goal will come to fruition. Progress must be monitored by the champion.

Approaching the strategic planning process with clarity of purpose is critically important to success. Once you’ve considered the above questions and those suggested by our February 18 blog, you’ll find dozens of other pertinent pointers and suggestions in our monograph Strategic Planning and Goal Setting for Results.