Accredited Strategic Planning Process – Ready to master the art of successful business strategy? Whether you are a micro-enterprise, start-up, scale-up or large blue-chip, the Intrafocus Strategic Planning Process (SPP) provides a robust methodology to guide you from start to finish. What’s more, our SPP has been endorsed by the CPD Certification Service as a mark of its quality.
What is the Intrafocus Strategic Planning Process
Our accredited SPP encapsulates seven distinct stages that every organisation must work through to create a sound business strategy.
Let’s turn our attention to the first two stages;
1. Vision and purpose, and;
2. Priorities.
What is the strategic vision and purpose?
As our team of strategic consultants will tell you, defining the strategic vision and purpose can be a real challenge! However, our methodology facilitates the process, by providing all necessary prompts, resources, materials and steps.
Beginning with the fundamentals: values
Vision and purpose both encapsulate what the business is; your goals and your intention for interacting with all types of stakeholders. But to define these, you must first know your core values – as the foundation of your very business.
The good news is, values are easier to define because they are intuitive and already in practice within your business. Why does your business exist? Why do you work in the ways that you do? What behaviours are valued in your business? These values might include customer focus, sustainability, honesty, making lives better and so forth.
Applying values to vision
Within the SPP process, you will choose 5-6 of your most important values, and lock them down to begin creating your vision statement. This is another enjoyable bit; defining the long-term, broad vision for your organisation’s future and the goal end-point. The vision is naturally exciting and inspiring and should get everyone in the room excited!
Why are we all here?
Once your vision is in place, you can add the purpose. Take that excitement about your long-term vision and explain how you will achieve it – and why you exist at all!
You’ll see that vision and purpose are naturally linked. In fact, most successful strategies will result in vision, purpose and values that can naturally align – creating a hugely powerful and effective strategic intent.
Guiding you through the steps
In the accredited Intrafocus SPP we provide full detail of these steps, with case studies and inspiration, templates and workbooks. This helps to guide your business leaders through each step with ease, understanding – and motivation.
Moving to Priorities
Our next phase is to take that compelling strategic intent and work out how it will be achieved. By setting strategic priorities, your business can gear itself up to work on what is truly important. This allows your operational and functional leads to allocate resources that truly deliver strategic priorities, and keeps everyone focused and on the same page.
Post-its at the ready…
Using our process, your business leaders will use our new resources to work carefully through this stage. It takes time and real focus, and we recommend creating data-packed information walls – adding brainstorm ideas that capture the:
1. Current situation (using a SWOT analysis, for example, to assess what is working, what isn’t and where there is potential to do better.)
2. Future view – with powerful techniques that we explain in our methodology to facilitate this challenging step.
3. Value proposition – clarifying what sets you apart from the competition, defined by the attributes that your customers really care about.
The session – or sessions – that take place during this stage are inevitably fun, lively and highly creative. When facilitated by the Intrafocus team, we typically use ‘low-tech’ Post-It notes to allow plenty of energy and interaction to come into play.
Once this information has been captured within each category, the ideas gathered are used to find just three priorities – moving around each note and grouping them into themed groups: such as customers, skills, technology, products and so forth. From here, the natural next step is to take the words already written, and use them to define the three priority statements.
Why you need three priorities?
As we explain in our workbook – the Law of Diminishing Returns applies here! Set three and you will be more likely to achieve them. Set more, and risk achieving fewer – or none at all!
With your three key priorities, you will then take the energy and inspiration of your decision-makers and bring them to life – working out how the business will implement them and creating an outcome-based strategic result for each, to measure what success will look like.
Find out more
These two first stages of the Intrafocus Strategic Planning Process as usually delivered in a strategy workshop, which is facilitated by a highly experienced Intrafocus strategic consultant. Our accredited SPP provides all of the necessary workbooks, presentations, templates and guides for each step to provide confidence and certainty in the process.
Whatever your starting position, industry or organisation type, we can help you to create that compelling, effective and results-driven strategy that will take you forward in the right direction; supporting your decision-makers at every stage to do what they do best! Contact us for a no-obligation chat and to find out more.
