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Strategy Roundtable™ Methodology Overview |
Introduction
Financial analysts, software engineers and product designers have for many years used automated tools to support their efforts. Spreadsheets, CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools and CAD/CAM software have been available since the mid-80's. All this time the planning community has done without comprehensive strategic planing software support. Instead strategic planners have made due by cobbling together a conglomeration of marginally effective software solutions. Strategy Roundtable™ Desktop Professional and Strategy Roundtable™ Enterprise for the first time provide an integrated, easy-to-use, multi-user (Enterprise only), graphical support system for the strategic planning function.
Strategy Roundtable™ Enterprise is a networked, multi-user, PC based solution running under Microsoft Windows™. Strategy Roundtable™ Desktop Professional and Strategy Roundtable™ Enterprise provide senior executives with the ability to build, modify and monitor implementation of comprehensive strategic plans. The tool enables executives to view text and graphic representations of developed plans. It also presents each business unit's plan components and their progress towards accomplishing established goals and objectives.
Strategy Roundtable™ supports the development and presentation of multi-level multi-year strategic plans including:
- Corporate vision, mission, values and assumptions.
- Corporate strategic goals and tactical objectives.
- Business unit strategic goals and tactical objectives in support of corporate goals and objectives.
- Analysis of business unit goals and objectives impact on corporate goals and objectives.
- Business unit action plans or projects including key tasks, resource requirements, dates and budget items in support of business unit and corporate goals and objectives.
- Analysis of project impact on corporate and business unit strategic goals and tactical objectives.
- Project risk/benefit and revenue contribution assessment.
- Progress tracking for approved business unit projects (including MS Project data transfer).
Currently implemented in a client/server environment, Strategy Roundtable™'s on-line Repository provides up-to-date access to current planning and implementation efforts, as well as providing the ability to review plans from a historical perspective.
You may customize Strategy Roundtable™ to support virtually any planning methodology by modifying one or more of the default Master Table values for various items including the labels for Strategic Goals and Tactical Objectives and the Project Category and Project Category Values used to describe and "slice & dice" projects.
Strategy Roundtable™ also supports multiple levels of business units with up to 39 organizational levels and an unlimited number of business units per level.
Strategy Roundtable™'s graphic displays of project information provide drill down capabilities allowing executives to see both high level trends and their underlying details. Strategy Roundtable™ Enterprise's roll-based security allows control of access to different levels of planning data by user and business unit.
The on-line Help facility provides a guide to the use of Strategy Roundtable™'s many features. Help suggests how these features may be utilized to support your strategic planning process.
The Strategic Planning Process
If Strategy Roundtable™ were targeted for an ideal world it would support a comprehensive strategic planning process that would address, at a minimum, three essential areas, Situation Assessment, Key Performance Criteria, and Goals and Objectives. Within these three domains there are at least five specific analytical steps: Business Definition, including Vision, Mission and Values Statement creation; Situation Assessment, including Internal Environment, External Environment, Competition and Strength, Weakness, Opportunity Threat (SWOT); Performance Objectives, including Resources, Capabilities and Critical Success Factors (CSF); Strategy Development; Implementation and Monitoring.
However, the real world is less than ideal and in the real world the great majority of organizations only approximate a comprehensive planning process. In the real world where strategic planning software is used, organizations use as much, or as little, of the ideal process as is appropriate for their situation. At a minimum, however, organizations should do the following:
- Craft a Vision Statement, a present tense statement of what things will be like three to five years in the future, a Mission Statement, what the company does, and why it does it, and Values Statements, the guiding principles for the day to day behavior of the organization.
- Assess the company's current capabilities and competencies in critical areas such as capital, technology and human resources, identify the capabilities and competencies required to realize the stated vision, and perform gap analysis, for example where and how the current situation falls short of the future required situation.
- Benchmark the best practices in the industry using primary or secondary sources such as consultants, journals and books.
- Formulate possible strategies to bridge the identified gaps for each critical area using the benchmark data.
- Analyze the potential impacts of the formulated strategies, select the most promising strategies and initiate projects to implement the chosen strategies.
- Start measuring. Measure the effectiveness of existing processes and procedures, measure the progress of strategy implementation projects, measure the satisfaction of customers (internal and external) and measure the success of the implemented strategies.
- Feedback into the planning system. (The reason for measuring.)
- Employ strategy software to support the process.
Performing any of these activities impacts the organization. Performing more of them and in greater detail more profoundly impacts the organization. The closer the process approximates the ideal, the better - to the degree that an organization has the resources to devote to the process and can complete the process in a timely fashion. The complete process may be ideal for a large multi-national, while a disaster for an exploding high technology company with 500 employees.
In any case, the process, unlike the diagram, is iterative, the steps often accomplished in an overlapping and/or concurrent fashion, and, in the ideal, would entail performing a number of more detailed steps.
In the real world where we all must work, anything that makes it easier to do what we know we "should" do is of great benefit. The whole point of strategy software such as Strategy Roundtable™ is to make it easier for organizations of any size to do more and better strategic planning, to more profoundly and more positively impact the organization.
To gain greater insight into Strategy Roundtable™'s capabilities,
Request a PowerPoint presentation about Strategy Roundtable™, or
Request a fully functional trial copy of Strategy Roundtable™ Desktop Professional (Trial License Agreement Required!).
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