Program Objectives
- Understand the meaning and importance of strategy
- Identify the demands and challenges presented by your organization’s environment
- Forecast the future business situation
- Create a core ideology
- Define your strategic direction
- Differentiate your organization from its competitors
- Set performance goals to focus your activities and measure your success
- Establish performance initiatives and a master plan to manage your long-term development
Module 1: Overview of Strategy
- Learn the meaning and critical elements of strategy
- Understand two orientations to strategy and determine where you are on this continuum
- Explore three approaches to strategy
- Assess the current strategy of your organization
- Assess the current results of your organization
- Learn the strategic design sequence you will follow in clarifying your strategy
Module 2: Analyzing The Business Environment
- Review current market conditions and key competitors
- Identify key customers, key stakeholders, and their expectations
- Identify key suppliers and rate tour relationship with them
- Identify external factors influencing your organization
- Evaluate current market conditions affecting your organization
- Review the strengths and weaknesses of key competitors
Module 3: Forecasting The Future
- Identify assumptions about the future environment of the organization
- Reduce this list into the “big hitters”, which define your future business situation
- Evaluate the impact of the “big hitters” on your organization
- Determine how your organization might respond to each of these assumptions
- Identify alternative future business situations
- Conduct a SWOT analysis to prepare to effectively manage the future business situation
Module 4: Creating Core Ideology
- Understand the role of a core ideology in your organization’s success
- Learn about the ideologies of some of the most successful companies
- Explore the legacy of your organization
- Define your organization’s mission
- Analyze the beliefs that have created your culture
- Reach consensus on your guiding principles
Module 5: Defining Your Strategic Direction
- Understand the primary questions that must be answered to establish strategic direction
- Clarify a vision of your organization five years in the future
- Identify the characteristics of your current customers and the deliverables you provide them
- Describe your future customers and how your deliverables and products or services may change to meet their needs
- Explore your organization’s core competencies and define the competencies you will need in order to compete in the future
Module 6: Defining Your Competitive Advantage
- Understand customer’s perception of value as the foundation of differentiation
- Create a long-term business focus
- Identify competitive differentiators within your industry
- Do a competitor analysis against the competitive differentiators
- Select competitive anchors that distinguish you from your competitors and competitive necessities that define in which area you must keep up
- Develop a value position
Module 7: Setting Goals
- Understand the importance of setting goals and tracking performance
- Learn the building blocks of goal-setting
- Identify your organization’s key result areas
- Establish metrics in each of your key result areas
- Assess your current performance
- Set goals in each of your key result areas
- Evaluate your feedback system
Module 8: Creating a Master Plan
- Understand the importance of an integrated, master plan for managing your organization
- Select a number of critical success factors for your organization
- Identify major performance initiatives to implement your ideal vision
- Fill out a performance initiatives matrix showing the relationship between your critical success factors and performance initiatives
- Learn how to create a project charter to guide the implementation of each initiative
- Know how to commission project teams for each initiative
- Understand the basics for project management and how to use a project implementation worksheet
