Strategy Software For Business Planning: ClearPoint

Turn your business plans into a well-formed strategic plan with ClearPoint.

Is your organization currently guided by a patchwork of short-term departmental business plans rather than an overall strategic plan? It’s a near-certainty that the lack of a strategic plan is limiting your organization's growth. You can change all that with the help of ClearPoint Strategy software.

ClearPoint is used by organizations of all types—healthcare, for-profit, nonprofit, and local governments—to establish strategic direction and achieve their objectives. It works so well because it eliminates some of the biggest obstacles related to strategy planning and execution, which include a lack of big-picture thinking, disjointed business plans, and overly complex reporting systems. ClearPoint users are more likely to:

• Think intentionally about the future. They use ClearPoint as a strategy command center, organizing the various elements of strategy from the corporate level down to the business plans of individual departments.
• Work as a unified group. They use ClearPoint to link departmental projects to organizational goals so everyone is working in tandem.
• Follow through on their plans. They take advantage of ClearPoint’s automation features to complete the mundane tasks associated with tracking and reporting on strategy, producing more insightful reports in less time.

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Still researching the need for strategy software? That’s understandable—if you haven’t used strategic planning software before you might not immediately see the benefits. In that case, let’s look at it from this angle: What brought you here today? What are the issues you’re currently struggling with? More than likely, strategy software can help solve them.

See if any of the below sound familiar:

• Departments throughout your organization tend to do the same activities year after year, which are mostly tied to the budget and yield little in the way of forward progress.
• You have an organizational strategy but business plans don’t necessarily align with it.
• Your efforts to track annual performance are excessively time-consuming and don’t yield much in the way of insights.
• Few staff are aware of your business plans and most aren’t engaged in achieving them.

These are common scenarios—and the reasons why many organizations don’t get ahead. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Strategy software is useful in all of the above scenarios. Even if you’re not ready to launch an organization-wide strategy planning session, you can wade in at the shallow end and start using software for business planning. It’s an excellent entry point for more ambitious strategic planning. And the best part: You’ll already have a top-notch system in place to support the organization’s more advanced planning efforts going forward.

Wondering what software does to combat the issues above? ClearPoint in particular was designed by strategy experts who are intimately familiar with the problems leaders encounter during the planning and execution phases. Here’s what makes our software so valuable:

ClearPoint encourages strategic thinking.

If your departments are mostly doing the same activities year after year—and those activities are dictated by the budget—you’re suffering from a lack of strategic thinking. Creating goals is a vital part of the strategy planning process, and you can do it easily in ClearPoint.

You can create ambitious annual business plans or longer-term organizational goals, and develop projects and measures associated with each to ensure they are carried out. You can also develop strategy maps to serve as a visual representation of your plans. To help you get started, ClearPoint has departmental business plan templates that make it easy to define your goals and strategy for the upcoming period.

Developing goals also improves your budgeting process: Instead of the budget dictating your activities, strategy and budget become close partners, an approach that helps you use your resources more efficiently and navigate difficult times more effectively. In ClearPoint, you can tie budget items to long-term goals.

The City of Fort Collins uses ClearPoint to manage its budget and strategy because it allows them to easily see the linkages between funded initiatives and strategic objectives, as well as performance metrics. When checking in on the progress of its strategic plan, leadership not only assesses the performance of linked metrics, but also the progress of linked programs and services funded in the budget.

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ClearPoint helps keep your entire team working toward the same goals.

When business plans aren’t aligned with organizational strategy you wind up with disparate groups working on their own priorities. And while that might mean that a particular department makes strides, it does little to move the organization itself ahead.

With ClearPoint, you can connect elements of a business plan to corporate strategy goals, making it easy to see alignment from the top level down to each department’s work plan. That means everyone, in every business unit, is working together to make the organization’s goals a reality. And because you’re using the same tool—ClearPoint—for both corporate and business plan management, it reduces the work involved in reporting and analysis.

Pampa Energía is continuously expanding through new projects and the acquisition of different companies. As they grow, ClearPoint gives them a way to view the business as a whole and make more strategic decisions.

They regularly use strategy maps and work to align each power plant’s scorecard to the organizational scorecard so they can see the individual contributions of each area of the business. They also use ClearPoint to track their objectives and initiatives, and communicate performance results organization-wide.

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ClearPoint helps you create insightful reports with little effort.

Without the right tool, strategy reporting is a complex, time-consuming process that could easily sink your strategy efforts. On top of that, we wouldn’t recommend walking into a strategy meeting armed solely with an Excel spreadsheet! Not only will attendees have a hard time interpreting performance and making decisions, but they’ll also struggle to engage with the wall of numbers.

In contrast, ClearPoint users spend a minimal amount of time generating useful, attractive reports that are easy to interpret. ClearPoint reports provide a visualization of department goals, measures, and initiatives, and allow you to include both quantitative and qualitative information for full context. In a single report, decision-makers can see how all the strategic elements, including projects and data points, fit together, and get as much or as little detail about each aspect as they like. In short, they have all the information they need to make smart decisions.

Another bonus: All this can be done with minimal effort. ClearPoint has automated 70% of the reporting process, saving you up to 40 hours per month per report. That means you can spend more time executing on your plans than reporting on them—what a welcome relief!

ClearPoint allows you to create strategic plan dashboards, like this one, to help decision-makers understand performance at a glance.

The nonprofit organization Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL) reduced its reporting time by 90% after switching to ClearPoint from Excel! The switch also gave them the push they needed to create a more detailed strategic plan and a consistent reporting process, which ultimately helped the organization grow.

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ClearPoint helps you be more transparent about your plans and performance.

Strategic plans aren’t just for top-echelon employees. Everyone, at all levels, must know about them and help carry them out in order to make them a reality. ClearPoint—in contrast to Excel spreadsheets—is easy to use and makes performance data easy to understand. Having continuous access to real-time updates and performance visuals is a motivating factor, and helps create a culture of performance management. ClearPoint reports also serve as an excellent strategy review tool for presenting periodic summary results to employees.

At San Juan Regional Medical Center (SJRMC), one of the most impactful results of switching to ClearPoint was its increased frequency of use.

Once managers realized how easy ClearPoint was to navigate, they were more inclined to use it, especially once they saw how simple it was to “see” their department’s performance. That, in turn, made it easier for managers to stay on top of their metrics and work to improve them. Even senior leaders log into ClearPoint to see where they stand with SJRMC’s goals, and can check the status of any objective, anytime.

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At ClearPoint, we’re dedicated to helping organizations of all stripes think bigger and work smarter. Our strategy software does the heavy lifting for you, but we also consider our team an added resource—one you can turn to anytime for strategy expertise. So if you’re ready to take the first step away from patchwork planning and toward more strategic planning, please get in touch. We’d love to show you ClearPoint in action!