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Lack of Firm Vision Dogging You? Why strategic planning is the smart thing to do

Say the words “strategic planning,” and many engineers will head for the nearest door. But committed firms that can make it through the process will be laying the groundwork for a sound firm vision and plan for the future.

Making your plan strategic

Strategic planning is the process by which your management team evaluates the firm’s purpose and values (Who we are?), assesses and documents the internal and external environment in which the firm exists (Where are we today?), creates a vision for the firm (What do we want to become?) and develops the goals and action plans to achieve that future (How do we get there?).

While planning doesn’t guarantee success, firms that do plan have a greater probability of success than those that only respond to the crisis of the day. This concept was articulated by the late Dr. Albert Shapiro of the Ohio State University Graduate School of Business: “Companies that plan never follow their plans, but they always make more money than companies that don’t plan.”

Here are five steps to developing your own strategic plan:

Step 1: Build partner consensus. Firm leaders need to reach a consensus on where the firm is and where it should be headed. Thus, all leaders must buy into both the process and the resulting plan. It’s equally important that leaders with dissenting views ultimately agree that a consensus of opinion will drive all decisions.

Step 2: Determine your approach. Decide on a top down, driven by firm management approach or a decentralized one where the various practice areas work on their plans independently; then mesh them together with the overall firm plan. Both ways work — it just depends on finding the process that best fits your firm.

Step 3: Perform a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This analysis will help you answer the “Where are we today?” question. You must gain a thorough understanding of your firm’s internal strengths and weaknesses to set a course for future actions.

It’s one thing to make the statement “We want to be the leading transportation firm in town,” and quite another to realize what it’ll take to make that statement a reality. In addition to having an understanding of the internal strengths and weaknesses, you need to know your market as well as your competitors’ capabilities and limitations.

Step 4: Set your goals. For your goals to be more than a wish list, make sure they are SMART:

• Specific: Setting a specific goal means establishing who is responsible, what needs to be accomplished and in what time frame.
• Measurable: A goal needs to have concrete criteria for measuring progress.
• Attainable: Does the person, team or organization have the skills and attitude necessary to obtain the goal?
• Realistic: The goal must represent an objective, mutually agreed upon strategy that the parties are willing and able to achieve.
• Tangible: Can achievement of the goal be observed by an independent third party?

Each goal needs an action plan to ensure accountability for the plan. The test of a strategic plan’s worth is whether the firm can look at the plan in a year or two and determine whether it has accomplished anything. For example, objectives such as “improve the quality of our client service” are meaningless if your firm doesn’t define what constitutes improved service and create benchmarks to measure the improvement of quality.

Step 5: Communicate and manage expectations. To keep momentum going, you’ll need to communicate the status of plan development to your leaders and management team at frequent intervals. The plan itself should be revisited at least annually and adjusted as needed to fit new realities of the firm and its marketplace.

Value the process

Those who truly understand the importance of planning recognize that the process is as important as the end result. With a little luck — and a lot of planning — you’ll develop employees who think and act strategically.

Find out how our expertise in accounting for architects and engineers can add value to your business. Email us or call us at 1 (888) 875-9770.

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