“Happy New Year!”

“Too early!” I hear you cry – well, not in the world of business…

Happy New Years don’t just happen, they come from proper planning and flawless execution… And that process needs to start sooner rather than later.

A large percentage of my time this month and last, has been spent helping companies develop their Strategic plans. Having learned the Policy Deployment process from Lean some 25 years ago, I am surprised at how few companies are aware of or use it. In fact, not just companies – whenever I go through the process with a PE or non-Exec in the room, they always want to steal the process to use in the rest of their portfolio…and often me with it, as the facilitation of the going through the process is as critical as the process itself.

It’s a simple process (plenty of info if you google it) that enables the alignment of a 5 year strategy (often quite high level and seemingly intangible) with what you need to do in the next 12 months to ensure you get there – it’s not rocket science, as simple as all the best things are, but will certainly give your business a boost and launch it into the correct trajectory (no apologies for the pun).

For me, a strategic plan is number #1 priority for any business – how can everyone in the business be pulling in the same direction if everyone doesn’t know the ultimate goal? And if you believe all the people in your organisation don’t need to know, then don’t be surprised when you have attrition and or frustrated team members. Whether you like it or not, when you employ a person, you get a brain as well as hands, arms and legs, and if you don’t utilise that intelligence, then you are missing a large part of what you are paying for, and risk that brain spending time thinking about things that may not be adding value to your business.

Even when Strategic plans are completed I often find them resigned to the bottom drawer, and only pulled out once a year. In reality, you can’t beat embedding a quarterly review of the strategic plan in your IMS (Integrated Management System) and reviewing it quarterly – it’s amazing how well that works to keep a team on track.

Many businesses only run an annual budgeting process, quarterly forecasting and monthly review of the P&L, and then wonder why they don’t hit objectives year on year. An effective IMS starts with the daily heartbeat of a tier review for every natural work group, builds up the MOS to weekly and monthly reviews and ends up by smashing budgets and delivering strategic objectives year on year.

So, if you want a Happy New Year for your business, and aren’t yet confident that it will be so, feel free to get in touch and discuss how I can help you.

Happy New Year!

– From all at MCDBT