Is your strategic planning process broken?

October 17, 2023

A few years back, I was engaged by a large technology vendor to help them explore why their planning had become so ineffective. The brief was to unpack the process and identify where there was friction and, more importantly, how to fix it.

With 2024/2025 looming, I hope this article provides some food for thought around ways to optimise your own strategic planning process to get the most out of your team’s experiences, energy and brainpower, and fast-track your outcomes.

The Methodology

To understand the existing process, we crafted a set of standardised questions.
We conducted separate interviews with leaders who were responsible for achieving commercial results across marketing, sales, operations and product, as well as the people within their teams who led the execution side of things (respectively referred to as ‘the doers’).
Interview data was captured, consolidated and analysed.

From here, we shone a light on what was broken. With this insight, we worked together to systematically put it back together again, with several working sessions to ensure that everyone’s needs were factored in.

Findings

# 1 Not enough runway

For this organisation, we found that the planning process generally kicked off around March or April. But with no wiggle room to accommodate busy diaries, inevitably more pressing priorities got in the way. This meant that plans were often not locked in until May, after which they still had to pitch internally to senior management for funding. Once the budget was approved, execution was a sprint and resulted in not being in market until July/August. We found this stall-at-the-gate stressed out ‘the doers’ and put the business on the back foot for the quarter, and for the financial year.

Recommendation: Start planning earlier, preferably in Nov–Jan (starting the year prior), to reduce the chances of the team getting distracted with other priorities.

# 2 Confusion over who’s leading the process

This was a big one. We discovered that each function (marketing, sales, operations and product) created their own plans with little communication or alignment with each other or the bigger picture. When they came together, each function’s perspective of strategic initiatives and tactics were different, which caused dysfunction and resentment—and wasted valuable time.

Recommendation: Assign an owner for each plan and clearly define roles and responsibilities, so everyone knows how they need to contribute. We visually mapped this out so people could see where their role stopped and started, and where ongoing involvement was needed. We also recommended that each plan, despite having a strong product focus, started with the audience need, contextual insights and commercial objectives.

# 3 Discrete styles

Interviewing ‘the doers’ revealed that the senior leaders they supported, each had very different approaches when it came to planning and gathering inputs. Some requested huge amounts of information that would require weeks of preparation work. Others turned up at their desks requesting information on the spot—underestimating the task involved to ensure the data provided was meaningful, in-depth enough and accurate. Along these same lines, some leaders used planning tools and collaboration apps, while others preferred emails.

Recommendation: All teams kick off with a standardised workshop and craft a templated structure so there was consistency around where and how knowledge and ideas were shared and captured. From there, the assigned owner can frame up the inputs and brief the leaders and ‘the doers’ across the teams on specific information to help add substance to the plan.

# 4 Too forward-looking

As a progressive organisation, there was a culture of racing ahead, rather than stopping to review more granular details that could hold valuable insights. An example was the preference to launch new initiatives ahead of building successful campaigns and activities into continuous and connected programs across other areas of the business. This meant that opportunities were lost, budget requirements were escalating and everyone was always too busy.

Recommendation: Incorporate’ looking back’ into the templated workshop structure so that everyone can firstly discuss and assess the results of current initiatives with a view to maximise impact before turning to the shiny new thing.

#5 Inconsistent strategic output

Having very different strategic inputs meant that the strategic outputs were also very different across the groups. Some leaders valued brevity while others valued detail. Some were fixated on a single activity like a major event, whilst others were more interested in the full marketing mix. This created several pain points across the business. The financial decision-makers had to invest valuable time in understanding each team’s discrete approach and it made it harder to allocate budget according to the same criteria. It also made the job harder for ‘the doers’ who had to invest time and energy learning and adopting a different approach depending on each product leader’s working style.

Recommendation: Craft a consistent template to present the strategic output. This means that while every plan will be tailored to reflect their own business unit or product, the content within them is standardised. This improves efficiencies, fast tracks decision making and grows shared understanding, including the ability to identify customer-led cross-product opportunities more easily.

#6 Quick pivots

Different approaches to the strategic process and final output also meant that there was no consistent tactical plan or process in place to fast-track initiatives into market. For ‘the doers’, this was particularly frustrating as there was uncertainty around how to get everything moving, and what support they would get along the way.

Recommendation: Each strategic plan needs to also include a robust and yet easily digestible execution plan (templated). This enables ‘the doers’ to pull the agreed strategic initiatives down into a WIP document (yes, another template) with timelines and weekly or fortnightly check-ins to keep stakeholders engaged and accountable—and projects on track.

What happened next?

Months were invested in gathering data, framing up the new process to address friction points and sharing learnings—with several touchpoints to get valuable input from the team. This input was used to continually refine the strategic planning framework until the vast majority felt that it reflected their needs. From here, management organised an offsite meeting so everyone involved had an opportunity to reflect on the end-to-end project.

This session started by sharing where we started, warts and all. From there, as a group, we walked through the new process with a particular emphasis on key moments that were critical if they were going to successfully reduce friction and improve outcomes.

Finally, it was over to the team to brainstorm in groups what they needed personally to help them to follow this new planning process into the future. These requests were captured in the final output back to the business and spanned executive support, learning and training, systems to better capture and share results and, yes, even more templates to support consistency right down to execution such as agency briefing documents and timelines.

Through this process, not only did the team help craft a strategic planning process that they all believed in, but it also reignited their passion and purpose as to the valuable role each would play in contributing to the outcomes of the business.

And importantly, going forward they would have the following new templates customised to their business to create new efficiencies and keep all teams and go to market programs on track: