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Guest post by: Ed Loessi Become an Author

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As part of the product development process for RapidInfluence we had numerous sessions with individuals both inside and outside of our target market. The purpose of these discussions were to work through the premises of our Strategic Planning Manifesto and to preview the first version of our product.

One of the more insightful sessions we had was with Ian Smith of Portfolio Partnership and the author of The Smith Report, a must read for growth companies. In our session we discussed the need for companies to create strategic plans and more importantly to implement them. During our discussion, Ian rightly pointed out that success in strategic plan implementation was largely dependent on knowing what the status of various action items are within the strategic plan.

In effect, if a manager doesn't have an easy way to see what is happening with the strategic plan then it becomes very difficult for them to actually guide people through the strategic plan implementation.

During the product development process we had already decided that having measures like percentage completed for an action item was too subjective because one person's 50% complete might be another person's 70% complete so we had scaled it back to the idea of 'started' and 'not started' however, Ian pointed out that this didn't really give someone a 'call to action'.

Since we were all about calls to action Ian suggested that knowing things like whether an action item was 'on schedule' or 'behind schedule' are the real bits of knowledge that a driver of strategy wants to know because that then signals them to take action.

If a manager wants to ensure that they are on top of the strategic plan implementation process and that they have the right resources in the right place then they need to know which action items are behind schedule so that they can go and help those people who are responsible for those action items, giving the the extra assistance that they need to get back on track.

Given that feedback, we changed our various status options for action items and plan elements to in our product to:

• Not started
• Behind schedule
• On schedule
• Ahead of schedule

This gave us a much more useful and informative dashboard view of the various strategic initiatives that were taking place. This really helped us refine the product and it was agreed by others in future sessions to be a really important way to think about the strategic plan implementation process.

Summary, if you are implementing a strategic plan you will live and breath by the actions of that plan and in order to increase your level of success then your strategic planning dashboard had better be telling you what is going on and in particular what parts of that plan are behind schedule so that you can marshall up the resources and get those actions back on track.

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