Strategic plan Enterprise IT

Write your abstract here

PLEASE NOTE: All instructions in the following document are provided in grey italic font like this. Any instruction text should be deleted. Examples use the ‘normal’ style and can be modified to suit the needs of your strategic plan.

Add the company vision – remember this is a statement about the future, only a single line. It should be inspirational and unique, for example:

Transforming society through the provision of ultra-high speed mobile information services

Add the company Mission – this is a statement about what you do today, what you produce and/or what services you provide. It is factual, anyone from your company should read it and say ‘Yes, that is exactly what we do today’, for example:

The number one provider of ultra-high speed mobile networks. We provide a variety of valuable content, including news, sport, entertainment and educational services, to the United Kingdom.

Core values provide the foundation upon which a business is built. These are the values any employee will sign up to when joining a company. They are the values that anyone looking at the company would automatically relate to. They have to be honest. A core value that is not in keeping with a company image has no value at all (other than a negative value). It is important to keep the number of core values small, five or six is considered optimum. A label and description is required. The label is usually used externally, the description internally. For example:

In any business small or large, there will be a need to break down a strategy into two or three overarching workable areas. These ‘Strategic Priorities’ provide a focus to more effectively create a set of business objectives. The strategic priorities can be found by looking at challenges and enablers in the first instance and then confirming the priority through something like a Strategy Canvas.

Challenges and Enablers

If you are familiar with SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), looking at challenges and enablers is similar to that process. The key is to be aware of all areas of impact, both good and bad, and derive from that your strategic priorities. Typically, this exercise will generate dozens of challengers and enablers, these are usually summarised in a table. This section has a short narrative followed by the summary table, for example:

The following table is a summary of a much more extensive set of challenges and enablers that were identified using the SWOT process. Through the information gained we can see that there is a need to quickly build on our current successes to develop our brand. There is a further more compelling need to focus on content supply and acquisition and to enhance our technical capability to better utilise content and provide up-to-date user interfaces.

Strategy Canvas

A Strategy Canvas provides a means to quickly identify strategic priorities. Building a strategy canvas can be undertaken ‘off-the-top-of-head’ or thorough extensive research or a combination of both. The results provide a visual representation of strategic priority or focus. This section would normally start with a short narrative followed by an image of the strategy canvas, for example:

The following Strategy Canvas has been developed by using a combination of in-house expertise and additional research where required. The canvas indicates, as expected, that in relative terms our content supply is not as strong as it should be and that our customer service is lacking. Our brand is relatively good, but the external research shows we do not appeal to a younger audience.

Using the SWOT analysis and Strategy Canvas, we have set three Strategic Priorities:

Note: the above strategic priorities have descriptions that are in a ‘results-oriented’ language. That is they describe an outcome as if it has happened.

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A Strategy Map is a visual representation of a set of business objectives grouped using a Balanced Scorecard format. That is, business objectives related to four areas or ‘perspectives’ called Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Organisational Capacity. Most importantly, the strategy map also links the cause and effect relationships for the business objectives. For example:

The major thrust of our strategy is to improve the way we procure and deliver information and content over our existing ultra-high speed network while continually improving the end-user experience.

Further narrative about the overall strategy should go here

There will almost certainly be a need to provide some further narrative at this point, one or two paragraphs will do. The author must not forget that many of the readers of this document will not have gone through the strategic planning process and so need some background. The business objective form the key part of the strategy and so it is well worth the effort to provide a concise overview

Each business objective must have an intended result. The business objectives in the strategy map are useful for presentational purposes, but to ensure the desired outcome is reached a description is required. The language used to describe the intended result should be ‘outcome based’, it should describe exactly, and in plain language what is meant by the label. In addition, each business objective must be measurable, have a target and an owner. For example:

A Strategic Initiative is the engine that drives change. Without a strategic initiative nothing will change, you will put in place objectives and happily measure them, but will have nothing tangible in place to drive the strategic change you are looking for. There does not need to be a one-one match between business objectives and strategic initiatives, in fact one good strategic initiative might drive improvements in several areas. The section should start with a short narrative and then describe the initiatives, for example:

The following initiatives focus on the core activities required to implement our strategy, they are in priority order and represent the corporate view. Where indicated there will be separate departmental tasks that feed into the corporate initiatives.

Please note: This is not a business plan, it is a strategic plan. It is unlikely you will be able to quantify exactly what the financial impact will be, however, you should be able to quantify the approximate costs of the initiatives and state a ‘relative’ impact to the business. If you can be exact, then great, but under normal circumstances fully costed business plans are a separate exercise. This section would start with a short narrative and be followed with the costs and impacts. For example:

At this stage the exact costs and benefits of the strategic plan have not be calculated, this will be done at a later date. However, the following provides a set of estimates based on the information available. These initiatives have been prioritised and assigned, business cases are being produced and will be available from July 2015 onwards.

An integrated strategy map should be included for completeness. There should be a pointer to the actual presentation as clearly the map in this format is too small to be useful. However, it does indicate that this iteration of the strategic planning process has been completed. The section should start with a short narrative explaining what the map is and why it has been attached, for example: