3 of 4: Creating Strategic Initiatives

The previous post covered the prioritization of strategic objectives.  This post deals with developing strategic initiatives to underwrite the objectives.

STRATEGIC INITIATIVES 

With a short list of strategic objectives in place, the next step is to develop strategic initiatives.  Strategic initiatives are major activities that resolve key issues required to fulfill strategic objectives, implement a strategy, and achieve the vision of the organization.  Strategic initiatives will likely be broken down further into programs (two or more projects) and projects as needed.

STRATEGIC INITIATIVE CRITERIA 

As plans are framed up to achieve the strategic objectives, use the check list below to ensure that the plans are strategic in nature. 
 

STRATEGIC INITIATIVE COMPONENTS 

While specific strategic plan components can be mixed to suit a given preference, the following four elements represent a good core structure:

The latter three components can be linked together in a chronologic sequence.  These steps provide windows to the implementation progress for the initiative.  It flows as follows:

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS RUNNING RULES

As the team develops initiatives, there are some good “running rules” to use during the development process. 

ASSESSING THE STRATEGIC INITIATIVES 

Once the initiatives are created, and the initiative owners consider them “final”, it is good to take an aggregate look to ensure the initiatives adequately cover current strategic issues and set the stage for future performance.  One check can be to compare the list of initiatives to the list of strategic objectives.  Objectives without support of an initiative should be discussed and scrutinized.   Another check uses a graphical display to compare the initiatives based on execution risk, time horizon until complete implementation, and relative financial reward.  This enables a leadership team to view the collection of initiatives in terms of a three dimension pipeline to the future.  Here is an illustration:

IMPLEMENTATION

With the portfolio of strategic initiatives finalized, the implementation process will involve communicating the initiatives to the organization and tracking the implementation progress.  The tracking of initiatives can be done in tandem with assessing the performance of the strategy using such tools as a Balanced Scorecard, Hoshin Planning, or similar systems.  That will be the topic of the next post. 

COMMENTS

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