While dealing with many potential and current customers, I have been able to identify some common challenges they faced at different stages of the process.
Being an enterprise-wide change, there is always a huge risk of resistance, lack of adoption or just failure while trying to implement it. I wish I was talking about just a couple of cases, but we have seen it happen several times.
When we talk to a new organization, we always like to point out and give examples on how you can use People Process and Technology for Strategic Planning.
We are talking about a three legged table, you need all three to be successful, so let’s see them in details.
- People: we are talking about clear roles and responsibilities. Who is the owner, who will be accountable, etc. But we also like to include here the main sponsors of the change and the direction they want to go with this. It’s really important to have that upper level support and alignment.
- Process: Are we clear on what the goals are and have a process in place to get there? How often are we going to review this process and evaluate performance? Check out Jonathan Becher’s post on why process matters more than analysis when making decisions to get another take on how important the process piece is.
- Technology: I have said it many times and now I say it again, for many of the players involved, this feels like more work that just falls on their table, so simplifying it or reducing it can be the key to success. This can usually be done with the right technology.
These three are not always deployed following that order. Some organizations like to choose the technology first and let an application provide the guidelines as a way to get off the ground.
People can usually mention other and more detailed items (our other post about Common Challenges for Strategic Planning), but usually they all can be categorized as People Process and Technology for Strategic Planning.
It’s worth mentioning that this same concept is applied to many different areas besides Strategic Planning.