Standard Strategic Planning Kit

Resource Kit
AUD$699 (GST included) + postage & handling

The standard strategic planning kit is an intensely practical, comprehensive guide that takes you through the strategic planning process. Using straightforward workbooks supported by information and power-point presentations you will identify and analyse the right data, make the right decisions, put together a comprehensive implementation plan, and create a document in a thoroughly professional format.

The kit contains:

* For ease and flexibility, the workbooks will be sent to an email address provided by you

The Strategic Planning Workbook

The Strategic Planning Workbook

Top

The Strategic Retreat - 40 Minute Video

The Strategic Planning Workbook Video

Top

Diagnostic Workbook

The diagnostic workbook provides you with practical steps so that you can collect the facts you need to reveal the financial and other benefits that will be available to your organisation when you have run a strategic retreat. To enable you to complete this straightforward analysis, the workbook contains suggestions about where the data you need is likely to reside in your organisation, it provides tables and charts that you can use to present the information to managers.

Top

Article Packs

Good strategic planning is easier if people have completed some ‘warm up’ thinking. A number of short articles on different strategic issues will be provided that you can give to the participants so they can begin the process of ‘strategic thinking’ before they start to do the strategic planning.

Top

Planning Presentation

Strategic planning has its own tools, steps, and ways to present data. This presentation gives those who will be involved a common understanding about what kinds of data need to be collected, what types of decisions will be made, what tools will be used, what steps will be followed, and what benefits will be delivered. This presentation also includes information about the strategic retreat.

Top

Eighteen Planning Workbooks

These workbooks take you through the standard blocks of information that any organisation needs to prepare to properly understand their current situation in order to make good strategic decisions. They provide you with the templates you need, steps to follow and suggest the most likely places that information may reside in your business.

  • Workbook One - Customer Analysis: This workbook shows you how to rank order your customer data so that the most important to your business are clearly identifiable. Additional layers of analysis are then added so that the likely future value can be assessed. This workbook includes an analysis of the most profitable customer segments and also contains an analysis of your organisation from the customer's point of view to judge the real strengths in your organisation.
  • Workbook Two - Potential Customer Analysis: This shows you how to identify and rank order the most appealing potential customers for your current business. This includes customers that are available at the moment, and those that could appear in the foreseeable future.
  • Workbook Three - Competitor Analysis: This analysis reveals the strength of your competitors, and the level of attractiveness and 'hold' they exert over your current or potential customers. It also helps you to identify potential competitors, so that you can be prepared before they become significant. Additionally, the workbook shows you the nature of the relationship your business has with its competitors, and how you need to present competitive advantage to customers.
  • Workbook Four - The Hallmarks of Success Analysis: This powerful workbook shows you what customers particularly value from organisations like yours, and the extent to which you possess the characteristics that truly make a difference. When you have completed the tables provided you will have an insightful understanding of where your organisation has gaps, the size of those gaps and the implications.
  • Workbook Five - Environmental Analysis: This workbook helps you to specify the physical, political/legal/tax, economic, technological, demographic and social environments that are currently having an impact on your business, and the extent to which these will change, and the possible consequences in the future.
  • Workbook Six - Barriers to Entry Analysis: This shows you the extent to which your business is protected by barriers that make it hard for a competitor to enter the market, or match your performance. This analysis helps you to strengthen any barriers that do exist, and shows you how much flexibility is available if you want to make changes.
  • Workbook Seven - Availability Analysis: This workbook helps you to quantify the extent to which your business is reliant on the supply of locations, equipment, raw material, specific suppliers and so on. The analysis helps you to identify vulnerabilities, and it helps you to identify if the future may hold some surprises.
  • Workbook Eight - Stakeholder Analysis: Stakeholders are those groups that have a legitimate interest in your organisation. You need to know who they are, what they need, want and expect, how satisfied they are at the moment and what requirements they are likely to demand in the future. You also need to know the extent of their influence, and the amount of attention that you need to invest to keep them happy. These issues are covered in this workbook, with revealing tables that help you to rank order different groups.
  • Workbook Nine - Culture Analysis: No strategy will succeed if it is counter cultural. This workbook helps you to plot your culture on two axes - fear vs freedom - and it provides a revealing insight into whether your culture can support innovation, the extent to which it is rule bound. This analysis provides clues about what has caused and what sustains the behaviours that you see in your organisation today.
  • Workbook Ten - Skills Matrix/Talent Analysis: This workbook helps you to readily assess the levels of both current skills and talent (potential to do more) in a way that shows you which parts of your organisation have the ‘intellectual horsepower’ to achieve the future direction of the business, and where there are important gaps and deficiencies. While this data is generated to help you with strategic planning, it will also be a useful input into people development programmes.
  • Workbook Eleven - Financial Performance Analysis: This workbook shows you how to present your financial data so that trends and themes emerge that ‘tell a story’ about the way in which your organisation has been performing financially.
  • Workbook Twelve - Process Performance Analysis: Using the sub-optimisation analysis framework this workbook helps you to identify the process capability of key processes and identify the extent to which these are optimised. This shows the financial consequences of performing at the current level, and provides an indication of the extent to which a process may act as a brake on your capacity to introduce change.
  • Workbook Thirteen - Risk Analysis: This workbook helps you to specify the key risks in your organisation, the likelihood that one of these risks will occur, the financial consequence, and the likely impact.
  • Workbook Fourteen - Resources vs Outcomes Analysis: This analysis helps you to identify the parts of your organisation that use up the greatest amounts of resources, and then plot these against the level of outcomes that are produced. This data is then presented on a quadrant that readily identifies when large investments are not producing the right level of return, and where modest levels of resources are able to produce pleasing returns to your business.
  • Workbook Fifteen - Cause and Effect Analysis: This specific strategic version of the cause and effect analysis helps you find the root causes of problems that are difficult to understand and/or identify. This analysis is provided as a small group exercise, that can be run in an afternoon. Once these causes are revealed then their individual impact can be assessed, and this paves the way for remedial action planning.
  • Workbook Sixteen - Benchmarking: This workbook explains the differences between process and end metric benchmarking, and helps you to identify the value available to your organisation from internal, industry and generic benchmarking. The workbook then helps you to choose key parts of your business that would benefit from collecting benchmark data and suggest practical and straightforward ways to collect this information.
  • Workbook Seventeen - Assessment Against a Scale: While benchmarking helps you to compare your organisation with others, the assessment against a scale provides you with data against a fixed scale of desirable organisational attributes. A framework is provided that allows you to score your business against scales for leadership, people management, strategic development and implementation, use of resources, process performance, system delivery, customer service, impact on society and business results. You are guided through a process that helps you to plot points and identify strengths and weaknesses.
  • Workbook Eighteen - Change Readiness Analysis: The greatest strategic plan will founder on the rocks if it is introduced into an organisation that is unreceptive. This workbook provides you with a questionnaire that you can use to assess your organisation’s readiness to change, and a way to present the data generated that helps you identify what preparation might be necessary before the strategic plan is unveiled.

Top

Retreat Presentation

Some executive groups like to have the opportunity to think through the questions that they will be asked before you run the retreat. This PowerPoint presentation provides you with the slides and a script so that you can comprehensively describe the activities and outcomes associated with the retreat. The presentation describes the ‘circle of opportunity’ and also covers the four key strategic choices that are available to your organisation.

Top

Retreat Preparation Workbooks

You do not want to be half way through the retreat and then realise that you should have collected some information, or included another person, or completed some preparation before you arrived. These two workbooks cover the following:

  • Pre-Retreat Workbook One: This helps you identify the types of information that you will need to prepare and bring in case it is needed to support a discussion or make a decision.
  • Pre-Retreat Workbook Two: This workbook helps you to analyse the participant list, so that the right people are involved. If there are too few people, then there is insufficient ownership of the outcomes, but if there are too many then the process becomes unwieldy, and there is a tendency to compromise some of the decisions. This workbook also helps you to identify the stakeholders in your business, in case you need some input from them before the workshop.

Top

Twelve Retreat Workbooks

This set of workbooks is designed to enable you to put together exactly the right retreat for your organisation, and so each of the key sessions is provided as a ‘module’. These ‘modules’ can be put together in a number of different configurations, and suggested agendas are provided for different types of retreats. This means that you can run your strategic retreat as a two or three day event, and you can include as much as you want. For example, you can incorporate an examination of your ‘mission, vision and values’ if you want, or you can skip over these sections if you have already completed this thinking by using a different agenda choice.

The workbooks are a step by step guide for you to follow. They provide you with a ‘script’ of questions to ask, blank templates to use, and an example as a reference. The workbooks provided are as follows:

  • Workbook One - Choosing the Agenda: This workbook takes you through a set of questions that reveal the ‘modules’ that apply to your business, and help you to choose the agenda that will deliver the outcomes that you want.
  • Workbook Two - The Scenario Options Analysis: This strategic tool helps you to form a picture of the kind of world that your organisation is likely to inhabit, and the shape it is most likely to take in the next five to ten years. It is used early in the retreat, and it helps you to assess the likely future scenarios for your organisation and to identify which of these is most likely to come true. This analysis does not directly generate strategic decisions; rather it provides a context for the decisions that will be made later on.
  • Workbook Three - The Market Future Analysis: This powerful tool shows you which customers and markets are likely to do well in the future, and which ones will decline. It helps your organisation to channel resources so that you can benefit from the success stories in your industry. This analysis also provides you with a coarse estimate of the amount of revenue you are likely to generate in the next five years.
  • Workbook Four - The Life Cycle Analysis: This shows you where your products/services/customers are in their lifecycle. It shows if they are in their growth, maturity or decline phases, and gives you the basis for making decisions about how to invest and how to resource your organisation.
  • Workbook Five - The Portfolio Analysis: This workbook shows you how to categorise your products/customers as one of the following: (a) Cash cows (b) Stars (c) Dogs (d) Not sure which category they fit into. This revealing analysis shows you where the future of your business lies, and it helps with the investment and resource decisions that you will make later on.
  • Workbook Six - The SWOT Analysis: The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis is amazingly powerful when used correctly. The workbook shows you how to identify your internal strengths and weaknesses and your external opportunities and threats and then categorise the data you have produced so that it becomes useful and actionable information.
  • Workbook Seven - The Concentration of Effort Analysis: This practical analysis concentrates all the data that has been produced so far, relates it to your long term ambitions and then creates strategic projects that will take you from your current situation towards your desired future position. You will identify the barriers that need to be removed, and you will specify the changes you need to make to take advantage of the opportunities that are available.
  • Workbook Eight - The Activity Hedgehog: This tool enables you to turn the output from the concentration of effort analysis into achievable projects that are within your managers’ power, resources and time constraints to achieve. When you have completed the activity hedgehog you have developed the overall action plan for implementing the strategic elements of your plan.
  • Workbook Nine - The Movement Analysis: This tool helps your managers to define the changes that should arise from making the changes that have been decided. This ‘movement’ can then be captured, and it provides the measurement framework to support the introduction and monitoring of the plan.
  • Workbook Ten - Your Mission: If you do not have a formal mission statement - or if you want to review your mission statement - this ‘module’ provides a practical process that helps your organisation to answer the question “Why are you here?” in a crisp and concise manner.
  • Workbook Eleven - Your Vision: If you do not have a formal vision statement - or if you want to review your vision statement - this ‘module’ provides a practical process that helps your organisation to answer the question “Where are we going?” in a way that is measurable, inspirational and able to be used by managers to guide day to day decision making.
  • Workbook Twelve - Your Values: Values are becoming increasingly important as a way to define an organisation, and as a touchstone for decision making. If you want to develop/review your values this 'module' takes you through a practical exercise that results in behaviourally defined values statements.

Top

Post-Retreat Workbook

You will conclude the retreat with a lot of information and a set of key decisions. This information needs to be recorded in a way that reminds the participants about what they did and decided, and it also needs to be available to be given to people who were not at the retreat.

This post-retreat workbook contains suggestions for several different ways that you can present the information generated and outcomes of the retreat, so that you have a thoroughly professional document that can be used as a reference document for charting progress.

Top

Change Presentation

It is likely that your strategic planning process will surface information that will create insights that will lead to decisions which will necessitate change. In some cases this change may be significant. This PowerPoint presentation outlines a practical and powerful change model, and also provides you with an overview for the action planning workshop.

Top

Action Workbook

This action workbook helps you to present your strategic plan in a number of different formats so that it can be readily understood by every one of your stakeholders. It helps you to identify uniting themes, and takes you through the steps you need to follow to run a successful action planning workshop. This workshop includes the following sessions (a) defining and reinforcing the mandate (b) developing a strong purpose (c) preparing the ground (d) confirming that the right people are involved (e) developing the details of the actions, activities, tasks and projects (f) creating early wins (g) organising the communication timetable (h) achieving lock in.

Top

Change Workbook

This workbook can be used to support the action workshop or used as a stand alone document. The change management workbook comes in two sections:

The first section is about the concepts. It takes you through each of the key concepts and provides you with a way to assess the extent to which each of these has been applied in your organisation. There are tables to help you with this assessment, a gap analysis to show where there are deficiencies, an impact analysis to show consequences, and an action planner to make sure that the right approach will be fully introduced.

The second section describes the process that is required to achieve a successful change (a strong mandate, a strong purpose, preparation, the right people, the right action plan, early wins, communication, and lock-in). The workbook takes you through each of the steps, and shows you how to assess the effectiveness of each one, recognise gaps, and develop remedial action plans.

Top

Audience Workbook

Different audiences need a completely different view of the strategic plan. What is important to the executive group is irrelevant to those on the front line. What is interesting from a supervisor’s point of view is trivial for managers. There needs to be a different package for your front-line, supervisors, middle managers, senior managers and executive.

This workbook helps you identify key messages using a ‘what is in it for me’ framework so that the content and process for different written and spoken communication can be properly tailored to meet the needs of the audience.

Top

Post-Planning Workbook

Your strategic plan needs to be documented in a way that captures the key information and decisions, points the way to the future, and can be used as a reference point for short, medium and long term solutions. It also needs to make sense to a number of stakeholders, and has to be able to serve as the basis for next years update. This workbook provides you with template options that you can use to develop your strategic plan. It contains references to examples and a decision making tool to help you decide the key aspects of the document (contents, level of detail, ‘look and feel’, etc). This workbook also helps you to recognise the places where the direction described in your strategic plan need to appear (annual report, website, performance plans etc).

Top