The 7 Steps To Creating A Strategic Action Plan

Do you need help to make progress towards your many goals? Many executives spend a lot of time and money trying to drive development without a clear action plan.

The dispersed planning and tracking processes that result in a lack of responsibility and visibility throughout the company are the core causes of this issue. Important action items slip between the gaps in this disjointed environment, making company objectives an impossibility.

You can integrate immediate operational demands with long-term strategic goals by fostering an organisational culture of accountability and strategic focus with the use of a strategic action plan and centralised tracking system.

We’ll assist you in ensuring the prompt and efficient implementation of your strategic initiatives in this guide by outlining the seven essential steps of strategic action plans—and how you can do it in a strategy execution platform.

7 Essential Steps for Developing Effective Strategic Action Plans

A strategy plan is only the start; to convey how you will carry out your plan, you need a strategic action plan, as any Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) worth their salt will tell you.

If not, all of your well-laid strategies will simply become an elegant but quickly forgotten goal statement.

Now let’s explore the seven essential phases for creating, carrying out, and monitoring strategic action plans:

1. Make sure your strategy and action plans are in line.

Your actions have minimal influence on the organization’s strategy if there isn’t obvious alignment and a clear linkage. Over time, budget depletion results from misplaced efforts in your strategic planning process.

CSOs should identify key business indicators and strategic objectives before creating a strategic action plan. Building action plans that assist teams in staying on course towards the organization’s strategic goals is possible with this foundation.

The majority of businesses have trouble coordinating their strategies because they employ different technologies, such as PowerPoint decks and spreadsheets. However, you may eliminate organisational silos and enhance cross-functional cooperation when you unify everyone and everything on a single platform.

2. Allow groups to create workable action plans

A lot of initiatives fall flat because the teams in charge of carrying them out don’t participate in the planning phase.

However, according to McKinsey, projects that involve staff members in development have a 3.4 times higher chance of success. They are more inclined to carry out the crucial action stages because they feel like they own the strategy.

Teams need to be empowered for them to create strategic action plans that complement the main strategic goals.

To accomplish this, inquire:

Which channels will you choose to convey your strategy aims and objectives? (For instance, live Q&As, workshops, etc.)

How do you convey just enough information without overwhelming readers with extraneous details?

How much time is provided to each team to build plans and carry out action items?

Cross-functional collaboration and clear communication are vital. An open approach is the only way to develop work plans that consider the actual organization’s situation and capabilities. 

3. Distribute resources

Without sufficient resources, even the most well-thought-out strategic action plan will fail. You need to make sure that your partners, resources, personnel, and tools are all in high demand and in harmony with each other.

It is, of course, easier said than done to organise your affairs and stick to a budget.

Your efforts will succeed or fail based on how well you manage your resources, particularly in terms of budget. If you are wealthy, you may still encounter opposition from important stakeholders or staff.

As you distribute resources among projects, follow these steps:

To determine how much you must sell in order to reach your goals, take into account your revenue ambitions. SMART objectives aid in directing your operational planning at this point.

Work together with department leaders to evaluate resources and confirm whether you have enough workforce, equipment, and time available. 

List expenses to get a complete picture of all unit economics, from materials and labor to marketing and new equipment. 

The onus is on CSOs and company leaders to do their due diligence. Only then will you be able to effectively allocate resources and communicate the value of the strategic action plans to your teams.

4. Assign proprietors

Many businesses use disjointed planning and tracking systems, which makes it difficult to keep track of who is in charge of what action item and to monitor progress.

Projects stall and progress fades away if your strategic action plan lacks explicit responsibility. When there is a lack of ownership, individuals tend to assign blame, making the entire organisation responsible for any negative outcomes.

Implementing a platform for strategy execution such as Cascade adds a level of accountability throughout the entire company. When you foster a culture of transparent communication and performance monitoring, staff members become aware of their responsibilities and how they affect organisational goals.

5. Establish deadlines for tasks.

According to Parkinson’s Law, tasks will become more complex and important to finish them in the allocated amount of time. Should your strategic action plan lack a roadmap with specific deadlines, it will ultimately lead to an extended and protracted failure.

Your staff will be less inclined to take action and will know less about how to rank important tasks in order of importance if there are no deadlines. Laissez-faire scheduling policies will ultimately result in resource-draining, bloated projects.

Morale inside the organisation may suffer when advancements come to a standstill. Not good news for your approach!

Each team member should be aware that their responsibilities are time-bound when there is a clear deadline for strategic objectives. You have to thoroughly evaluate every project’s specifics and the resources available to set a realistic time frame. The goal is to create a sense of urgency and prevent procrastination.

6. Specify how you plan to gauge your progress.

Spreadsheets are where many strategic action plans languish and die. Although many businesses are familiar with Excel, it is not a useful tool for measuring progress.

It will get more difficult to keep an accurate picture of your real-time data the faster you go. And no matter how hard you try, this laborious method will always take a lot of time and be prone to mistakes. You’ll eventually overlook red flags or chances for advancement.

To put it bluntly, if you aren’t using trustworthy tracking methods to gauge success, your plan won’t work. Establish these essential elements right away:

definite objectives. Every team needs to have quantifiable objectives with specific figures. To enable teams to see how their efforts contribute to success, all initiatives, projects, and actions must be linked.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These measurable values track your progress toward achieving business objectives.

Dashboards and reports. A simple way to measure and visualize the results of your actions and correlate those results to the strategy’s overall success (or failure). 

This data-centric approach gives you a clear lens to assess performance. Better yet, you can base your decisions on hard evidence, not just guesswork or gut feeling.

7. Track and evaluate results

According to Gartner, 58% of companies use inadequate performance monitoring solutions. It will be hard to make improvements to your approach without sufficient systems in place to assess its effects.

And this is where a lot of organisations fall short. It can be a misplaced trust in disconnected technologies that make real-time data collecting and analysis more difficult or in static reporting tools like Excel.

In actuality, strategy is successful because of an iterative process that depends on ongoing observation and remedial action. Red flags can be identified before they blow up into massive fires by keeping a careful eye on important performance parameters.

Companies can also find patterns and trends through routine strategy assessments, giving leaders the information they need to make informed decisions.

This continuous feedback loop enables you to respond to market changes or internal shifts, ensuring the organization remains on track toward its strategic goals.