Time To Conduct A Strategy Review? Here's How To Get Started

Your organization may have gone through a strategic shift this year. It could be a technology advancement in your market, a new political regulation, new competition, or a major change in revenue, up or down.

Many organizations don’t consider how these changes affect their strategic plan. Those that do often don’t know how to adjust the plan to fit. Keeping your strategy current is an often overlooked part of the strategy implementation process. We’ve found the best way to evaluate your strategic plan, and to carry the changes into next year’s strategy, is to hold annual strategy reviews.

What Is a Strategy Review?

A strategy review is the process in which organizations discuss the progress of their goals and objectives and make the necessary adjustments for the upcoming year.

Even if there is no obvious need for one, taking the time to evaluate performance and identify areas for improvement has several benefits:

• One of the most significant benefits is that employees have an opportunity to re-engage with the strategy. Depending on where they sit within the company, some people may not be regularly immersed in the strategic plan. A periodic review brings it back into focus for everyone and can renew their sense of purpose.
• It reinforces organizational alignment. Bringing everyone together to clarify mutual goals promotes collaboration and teamwork. Employees are also reminded how their daily activities contribute to the bigger picture.
• It also promotes camaraderie among team members, leading to a positive, high-performance culture. Strategy review sessions let leaders shape culture by rewarding actions that align with organizational values and by including everyone on the team.
• Finally, it offers the chance to identify new growth opportunities that could benefit you financially. Assessing current market conditions and evaluating internal performance might lead you to make a major change in your strategy, such as creating a new objective or redirecting resources, that will help you be more successful.

When and How Often Should You Do a Strategy Review?

Most organizations do a strategy review once a year, typically at the end of their annual cycle. If you run on the calendar year, your review takes place in January or February. Otherwise, it happens at the start of your fiscal year.

Conducting this review annually allows you to review the previous year’s results and home in on elements that might need to be changed for the new year. If your organization goes through a big change, such as hiring a new CEO, hold an ad hoc session then to realign your priorities.

How To Revise A Strategic Plan: 4 Steps

These four steps help you identify and approach strategic changes productively, so everyone in your organization works toward the same goal.

Step 1: Review The “Big Picture”

The first thing you need to do during your strategy review process is step back and look at each element of your strategic plan. We always suggest asking the question, “Is our big-picture strategy still valid?” This question is often overlooked. If your organization’s position has changed over the last year, or the last several years, that change affects every element of your strategic plan, from your mission, vision, and values down to your objectives, measures, and initiatives.

Look at your market and operating conditions for any disruption in technology, politics, the environment, or elsewhere. You could find, for example, that a new competitor has entered your industry and is changing the pricing model for the entire market.

Step 2: Review Details Of The Plan Itself

Strategic plan details include your objectives, measures, and initiatives. Here’s how to review each:

‍Objectives are your high-level organizational goals. During your strategy review process, you’ll need to ask, “Are our objectives still relevant? Do they relate back to our mission, vision, and values?” Base your answer on actual data, not gut feeling.

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Measures are sometimes referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics. Each objective should have measures, and each measure needs a realistic target. Changes to measures should come from department heads or others in leadership, so we recommend holding a strategy retreat or half-day meeting to discuss any measures that need to change.

‍Initiatives aren’t one-off tasks; they’re big picture or long-term projects your organization is tracking for strategic success. You’re more likely to shift, remove, or add new initiatives during your strategy review process than you are to change your objectives or measures. So discuss budget, start and end dates, and tie-ins to your measures and objectives before making these decisions.

Step 3: Improve Your Reports

Reports are how you communicate performance on your strategic plan. If you ignore them during the review, the strategy you worked hard to build may stop working. Ask these questions:

• Are we meeting at the right frequency? Quarterly and monthly meetings have different purposes, and you’ll want to be sure each meeting you hold is productive. (This guide to meeting management can help!)
• Are our reports formatted correctly? Do your reports show the information everyone needs to see in order to understand your performance? Keep in mind that each report will highlight different information; a measure report might show the owner, the frequency at which it’s being tracked, and series status, while an initiative report might show the start date, end date, budget, and milestones.

Step 4: Communicate Changes To Your Organization

When you review your strategy, plan how you’ll communicate changes to it across the organization. Without that, you won’t get organization-wide buy-in, and strategic success gets much harder.

The United Nations Federal Credit Union (UNFCU) achieved buy-in by making their strategic plan as visible as possible internally. They used videos, progress reports, brochures, posters, and even a strategy map cake to keep the organization’s printed strategy in front of employees and consistently on their minds. You can read more about how they used this strategy to their advantage in this case study.

4 Tips For Conducting An Effective Strategic Review

These tips make a strategy review more productive:

• Include members from across the organization. Including more people and flattening hierarchies brings out new ideas. Encourage management to participate rather than lead, and all levels of staff to engage on equal footing.
• Make use of an outside facilitator. Both the management team and employees may have difficulty seeing “outside the box.” It often helps to invite an experienced outsider who can see things through an objective lens and guide conversations around tough subjects that need to be tackled.
• Modify your strategy as needed; don’t overhaul it. Strategic decisions are long-term in nature and involve big commitments, so in most cases, the basic direction of your strategy shouldn’t change every year. A strategy review may prompt adaptations, but the bigger picture should stay relatively consistent.
• Learn from your annual reviews. During each review, you will find that certain exercises worked or didn’t work with your organization. Continue to iterate on your review process so you can improve it over time.

Want to Ensure That Your Strategy Review Process Is Successful?

We have seen many organizations, including many of our own clients, struggle to conduct strategy reviews. That is why we created our step-by-step strategy review template.

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It covers each of the four steps above in more detail, explains how to manage your previous-year and future-year strategic plans, and says what to do if you’re abandoning your current strategic framework entirely. Work through each step and check off each part of the included checklists, and you will have a successful strategy review.

If you’d rather build it than download a file, use the free strategy review agenda template. It works in the browser with no account, and asks for an email only if you want to export.

Simplify Your Strategy Reviews With ClearPoint Strategy Software

Following through on a strategy over three to five years takes a lot of work and focus. Strategy software like ClearPoint simplifies tasks such as data gathering and reporting, and helps keep your effort on the activities that move your objectives.

Because ClearPoint holds your strategy information in one place, it serves as a quick reference during annual reviews for:

• Your big-picture strategy map.
• Organizational and departmental objectives, measures, and initiatives, and how they interconnect.
• Performance data on KPIs that roll up into strategic objectives.

You can review these items and make changes on the fly, as one of our customers did during a recent strategic review. The customer, a local government, had just created new city-wide objectives. During the meeting, its administrators broke into focus groups, with each group assigned to a specific objective.

The groups used ClearPoint to link existing departmental measures and initiatives to the new organizational objectives. When they came back together, they used ClearPoint to view and discuss the strategy, and noticed that some of the objectives were not currently supported. As a result, they discussed the need for additional measures and initiatives that would help them accomplish all their goals.

That is what the software is for: you identify needs, evaluate options, make decisions, and follow through, all with the help of ClearPoint.

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