TMNG Clients Ensure Market Successes Through Strategic Planning Management

Holistic Approach Engages Organization Stakeholders in Dynamic Process with Measurable Results

Strategic planning is as common to doing business as buying and selling, but too often companies fail to realize just how much the process can contribute to organizational strength and success beyond merely setting goals and mapping ways to attain them.

Indeed, says Renee Shelton, Vice President of Business Planning and Implementation at TMNG Global, the real value to be drawn from a well-conceived strategic planning program is in the process itself. Dynamic strategic planning keeps the entire organization engaged and in sync with company goals, but it also generates pragmatic common vision on what is valued, what works, and how to assess progress.  This enables alignment on key work streams and processes and helps translate strategy into operational targets and initiatives.

Seen in this light, strategic planning is an ongoing process that must be managed with careful attention to all phases of implementation through the life of the plan. “Strategic Planning Management® (SPM) is something we at TMNG believe all companies should do, at multiple levels of the organization,” Shelton says.

“Traditionally, good strategic planning enables teams to transform leadership vision into strategies and a set of actions with defined, measurable results,” she continues. “A robust and ongoing SPM program goes much farther, not only ensuring development of a good plan but keeping the stakeholders engaged in a collaborative way to sustain execution, monitor results and make adjustments in response to new information and new internal and external conditions.”   

The Role of Outside Expertise

As Shelton notes, a comprehensive SPM program is difficult for a company to mount on its own, given the distractions of day-to-day operations, strains on management resources and the need for the solid expertise required to shape and run such a program. But the benefits of SPM are too great to ignore, which is why TMNG Global has found growing demand for its services as a facilitator of SPM development and execution.

“We are facilitative experts in the strategic planning process,” Shelton says. “We help company leaders define and then translate their vision into clear strategies with well-defined steps and appropriate metrics for evaluating execution and impact. And we often stay engaged in the process to drive communication and buy-in, stimulate cross-functional teaming and keep critical stakeholders focused on implementation and collaboration.”

TMNG’s SPM teams place great stress on fostering creative thinking and good interpersonal relations. In fact, this is where the real value in the process emerges.

“We help establish an environment that induces management to think outside the box,” Shelton explains. “It’s a process that fosters frank discussions and creates buy-in and personal and departmental accountability.”

TMNG’s approach to SPM keeps the sense of shared purpose and cooperation front and center, ensuring that as individual managers and their departments go their own way in day-to-day operations, they know they are accountable for how their decisions map to the greater good. And they know that, as new needs arise or results on specific strategies dictate adjustments, there’s a dynamic planning framework in place that allows them to work with their colleagues to reshape elements of the master plan to sync up with emerging priorities.

“Departmental planning teams often work in a siloed environment,” Shelton notes. “We recognize that marketing must have its plan, customer care its plan. Operations, product development, etc. – all have their own plans. But under the strategic planning framework they all gain an understanding of how their plans impact others, as well as the key strategies.”

She adds: “By building a plan and putting this framework in place, you have a repeatable process that assures you’re always aligned with the corporate vision. And you can use that framework to respond to changes in the business environment that might dictate changes. By going back regularly and defining where you’re at, you’re able to accurately assess changes and immediately refine your vision and strategies. Waiting for the next annual planning cycle often can be too late”

Multiple SPM Scenarios

A key to TMNG’s success in SPM is its long experience with companies of many shapes and sizes across many industries. Often TMNG is called on to help strengthen a company’s ongoing strategic planning cycle. Other times the engagement might be tied to strategic planning that is undertaken to integrate merged companies or to re-orient the company’s direction as it moves beyond startup to large-scale operations. 

Shelton cites the instance of one major player in mobile which started out in a race with competitors to build out its network and make service available to as large a population as possible. But after three years the company recognized that the orientation of its operations around a buildout-focused strategic plan was no longer appropriate to its market position.

“They began to realize they were in a huge paradigm shift where strategic planning needed to be focused on operational efficiencies,” Shelton says. “So we were brought in to help redirect the planning and to help the whole organization think differently about the strategic direction and key priorities. The resulting framework allowed them to look at the performance parameters that were essential to driving profit from an operational efficiency standpoint.”

She notes that there’s an especially strong need for expert SPM in merger and acquisition situations. “There’s an important role for strategic planning in the pre-M&A phase, which too often is overlooked,” she says. “We’ve found that, when you look at failed M&A strategies, invariably the players have failed to engage in an in-depth pre-merger planning process.

“Top executives from two companies will come together and decide a merger is a good idea, often forgetting that before you make the decision to merge you should go through an assessment of the mission, values, direction and culture of the organizations to determine if they’re really on the same page,” she continues. “If you put the teams together as part of the pre-merger planning process to see if they agree on these things and can work together, you’ll have a much better idea of whether the combination is going to work.”

Customization is Essential

Shelton and her colleagues recognize that every company is unique; requiring a highly customized SPM approach to fit the culture, structure and depth of capabilities and commitment the company has to execute an ongoing process. “Every organization has a different orientation for planning,” she says. “We’ve gone through this for years, and we know there are no cookie-cutter approaches to building strong plans.”

This hands-on approach means TMNG must develop an in-depth knowledge of the company. “One of first things we do when we engage with a company is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the business environment they’re in, their leadership styles, their change management strategies and the details of their organization structure and processes,” Shelton says. “This allows us ensure that the strategic planning framework is customized to the client’s needs end to end.”

In some cases, the company might be well positioned to undertake a very thorough process that leverages all the elements that TMNG brings to the table for ensuring close synchronization on the strategic plan across all functionalities. “We’ve worked with organizations that have taken as many as 400 people through the process of building their plans,” Shelton notes. “Once senior management formulated the basic strategy, they wanted to take all department managers and their direct reports through the planning process and ensure everyone linked in, from start to finish.”

In other instances the strategic planning framework may need to accommodate the fact that the company is ill equipped to execute on all the particulars. “We find organizations are at very different levels of maturity when it comes to their ability to go through an in-depth planning process,” she says. “There’s nothing more frustrating, or wasteful, than putting a plan together that’s too hard to achieve. You won’t have the buy-in you need at the lower management levels to get things done.”

This may mean senior management has to trim back on their goals. “Maybe they have ten objectives, but we discover they must focus on the top five,” she says. “Our role is to make sure they focus on what’s effective, but also doable.”

In other cases, the role TMNG plays becomes an evolutionary process where, at the start, the engagement is tied to working with top management to define the plan, which they intend to push down through the organization once it’s developed. Then a second phase in the engagement emerges where TMNG develops processes that will improve the ability of individual departments to execute the plan.

“We help build teams underneath the executive layer to define specific steps needed to improve performance,” Shelton says. “By putting people together to work cross functionally, you often identify simple process improvements that can achieve results very quickly.”

Some large companies might have a mature, well-ingrained strategic planning process with strong inter-departmental support and solid metrics to draw on in gauging performance through the course of the plan. In such cases, TMNG may only be needed to help senior management formulate the strategic planning framework at the outset of each new planning cycle.

But even these types of companies often find there’s a need for assistance during the lifespan of a given plan when new agendas emerge that don’t fit into the existing framework. “In these situations, which are common to mid-size and large companies, we help facilitate revisions in the plan and processes to bring these new developments into the framework,” Shelton says.

Assuring Measurable Results

No matter what the nature of the engagement might be, a key component to success is the ability of TMNG to assist in defining and applying the metrics that are essential to tracking performance on the strategic plan. This applies to large as well as small companies.

“We’ve worked with companies where the business has changed, and the plan has changed, but things still aren’t working as expected,” Shelton says. “Often, we find they don’t have the right metrics in place to support progress in the new environment. Developing the right focused measures helps redirect attention and activity and quickly leads to improvements.”

Traditionally, she notes, strategic planning metrics largely had to do with developing a financially driven scorecard. “You looked at EBITDA, year-to-year growth, management costs as a percentage of operations expense, etc. – hard-core measurements,” she says. “When you take it the next step down to where you’re looking at specific operations groups and how they tie into the plan, measures must be more specific to the activity.”

Adding to the measurement complexities, a holistic strategic planning framework also must track performance from customer-focused and employee-focused perspectives. “Maybe you’re a medium-sized company that has set a goal of broadening its customer mix, moving, for example, what had been an 80/20 ratio of one customer category to a 60/40 mix over the lifespan of the plan,” she explains. “You have to add the tracking of progress along that trend line to your assessment of performance on the overall plan.”

Identifying what a company can measure and what it can’t is crucial to creating a viable strategic planning framework. “We can tell a customer what a best-in-class result on a given metric might be, but if they can’t measure on that particular parameter, it doesn’t do them any good,” Shelton notes. “We help the customer to define the metrics they can measure and then advise them on what the targets should be based on our experience and industry standards.”  

TMNG has found that, over time, a company executing a holistic strategic planning process will amass the internal experience and data points that allow it to expand the range of metrics it applies to measuring performance. “As they implement their action plans, we usually find that the metrics mature, which allows us to help refine the performance assessment process through the planning cycle,” she says.

Ultimately, no matter what the specific conditions might be, the goal of SPM is to maximize the effectiveness of a company’s most important resource – its people. “Our purpose is to get them marching to the same sheet of music,” Shelton says. “You want to get to a point where everyone is contributing to the success of the overall plan with a clear understanding of their tactics and measurable results.”

Strategic Planning Management©

Strategic Planning Management is a customized and holistic planning process that enables the leadership vision to be transformed into clear strategic actions with well defined tactics and measurable results.

Product Components:

1. Strategic Plan Development – Structures the strategic planning process. Proven practices and skillful facilitation quickly assist in solidifying leadership vision and pinpointing strategies and actions required to attain success.
2. Strategic Deployment and Process Improvement – Builds on the Strategic Plan to identify and track critical actions steps and process improvements needed to achieve prioritized initiatives.
3. Cross Streaming (Integration & Implementation) – Emphasizes communication and collaboration with critical stakeholders.

Benefits:

1. Clear understanding by all employees of the corporate vision and their role in its achievements.
2. A repeatable embedded process that ensures alignment with corporate objectives, shortens cycle time, produces actionable plans, improves quality and accountability.
3. Improved employee satisfaction, customer experience and financial performance.