Strategic Planning is a very important aspect of business activities and is practiced widely – if not always so satisfactorily. Well designed and executed planning provides an overall strategic direction to the management and employees of an organization and also enables functional areas such as finance, marketing, organizational development, and human resources to achieve success.

Done well, strategic planning is a very clear roadmap that enables an organization or business of any size, to achieve its’ goals. Done poorly, or not at all, and a company stands very little chance of surviving, let alone prospering.

Here are seven critical success factors for the creation and implementation of any strategy:

  1. If you don’t have a strategy for your business then your employees won’t know how their work contributes to the overall goals for the company. This means that they show up, work eight hours, go home, and start over tomorrow – with little sense of how success is defined. Without a detailed set of tactics tied to a defined strategic plan, there is little hope that you will reach your business objectives.
  2. Know the difference between strategy and tactics. Tactics are the things we do everyday as a routine part of our job. Tactical activities include blocking and tackling on a football field, preparing a hamburger in a restaurant, sending out bills in the accounting department, making a sales call on a client, developing a new e-product, or creating a web site. Tactical performance is important and everyone needs to work hard to make it good. Strategy is not simply scaling up tactical activity
  3. Open Planning. It is very important to be as transparent as in possible with your planning efforts. While in most organizations, plans are created by a group of managers or executives because of scale and scope issues, the draft plan must be made available to members of the organization for input and comment – especially the middle management cohort. In the end, these are the people most responsible for implementation, and the better they understand the strategy, the easier and mistake free will be their execution of it.
  4. Employee buy-in. If you have created your plans “in the dark”, and expect to simply roll them out as a finished product with no involvement in the creation or refining of them by your employees, your plans are either going to fail utterly, or not be at all as effective as you had hoped. A major contributor to strategic plan failure is assigning implementation to employee(s) who never participated in the planning. You must find ways to include your employees – indeed in some cases your partners and even your competition – in order to reach your goals. It is simple common sense; people do a better job when they understand the context of what they are being asked to do.
  5. Every manager must understand that communication is the key to successful execution. The best strategies and tactics will fall well short of the desired result if each are not effectively communicated and consistently reinforced. Telling someone what to do one time simply does not qualify as effective communication. To completely engage an employee, he or she needs to know the what, why, and how behind the strategy employed and the tactics devised to support that strategy.
  6. Carefully quantify the results you want to achieve. You need to quantify results at the enterprise level, as well as at the functional level. Cascade and translate these goals throughout your business. Distinguishing between ends and means are key - results are ends that define in measurable terms the future we want to create. Means are the methods and tactics you choose to achieve the results.
  7. Finally, we come to measurements. If you cannot measure a strategy or a goal, it is not stated very well, and, perhaps even more importantly, it is very unlikely to be achieved. If you have no Measures, you will know neither when you have arrived; nor know if you are on the right track. Remember to understand and measure the whole of your strategy, and don’t measure means only, at the expense of ends.

Critical success factors are all about creating focus while planning and implementing your strategy. Ignore them, and you are planning to fail, not planning to succeed.