- Corporate level strategy
- Business level strategy
- Functional level strategy
A Good Organizational Strategy
A good organizational strategy. A good strategic business plan reflects the business intentions of the enterprise and correlates them directly with the realities of its business environment. Just like a business strategy, a good organizational strategy (human systems design) reflects the intentions of the enterprise correlated with the realities of its operating environment.
Human system design is, therefore, a work planning from a strategic work distribution perspective. It has to provide for jointly optimized payoffs for the organization’s three major stakeholder classes: Its customers and suppliers, its investors, and the people who work there.
An organizational strategy is a plan that specifies how your business will allocate resources (e.g., money, labor, and inventory) to support infrastructure, production, marketing, inventory, and other business activities.
When you create your organizational strategy, you should first divide it into three categories:
Think of each category as a building block in the larger organizational strategy that guides your business.
One of the best ways to start creating an organizational strategy is to examine your current procedures. Scheduling, for example, is notoriously complicated. Preparing your business for the changes to come means streamlining the process so your team can better adapt once you set your organizational strategies.
Few things can help you in that regard the way scheduling software can.
The strategy is long-term. How you define “long-term” is up to you. But the further ahead we look, the fuzzier things get. Most companies choose three to five-year strategic plans. This allows for greater certainty than, for example, a twenty-year plan.
But why not make the time frame even shorter than three years? The reality is that strategic planning takes a lot of time and effort. You’d probably have to start working on your next strategic plan at last six months to a year before you’ve completed all the actions you planned last time around. Without much in the way of results to progress from, shorter plans become meaningless.
Most strategic planning initiatives begin by asking the question: “Where are we now; and where do we want to be?” It covers everything from the identity of the company to its reason for existing. That’s why you will begin by formulating or revisiting your organization’s vision, mission, and values.
There are those who believe that “impressive-sounding” vision, mission and values statements are the way to go. But if these statements are just there to impress your customers, they won’t benefit your business. Instead, your vision, mission, and values statements are there to define who your organization is, what it wants, and how it will achieve that. If your vision doesn’t inspire you and your staff – why work towards it? All members of the organization should be able to identify with the direction you are taking.
Once you have looked at the big picture of what you want to achieve, the next step is to look at the journey you will undertake. Once you have determined your strategy and what must be done to make your goals a reality
About the Author
Dr. Jeff Evans
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