WHY STRATEGY PLANS FAIL?2

As Continuing on this essay on why strategy plans fail, I am sharing two most important reasons.


4. Focus on planning and not on implementation
Lots of monies, energies, team effort, and concentration were devoted to planning and consultations and reviews but the real work to be done does not even have a budget or people assigned to carry out proper implementation, monitoring, and performance measurement.

This happens more than regular. The initial sizzle and excitement about the plans get dissolve as time passes by and newer issues and challenge preoccupy the organization leaving the real tasks of implementation to lower-level staffers.


5. Lack of proper controls and measurements
A lot of strategy plans fall by the wayside because there are no systems set to monitor, control, and measure performance in  a regular fashion. A high-level executive should set clear guidelines in terms of how the implementation will be reported, checked, controlled for slippage, delays, and inaccuracies, and measured for effectiveness and efficiencies.

There is also a need to have a regular check-in rhythms with all critical team members to provide corrective actions to lagging and ineffective performance, set up standards of excellence, and increase the confidence of implementers to report early signs of detours from original plans, and account for new realities in the environment where plans need to be tweaked here and there. This is a major part of the commitment of management to see the plans through and make it work.

I hope these give you a sense of the critical misses around strategies and how these can be avoided by creating contingencies and systems in place to avoid the common implementation and planning errors that most organizations make. 

Critical strategic thinking does not end when the plans are written out and publicly acclaimed. The real test of strategic thinking is when management takes the plans and makes it work in an environment where it is easy to abandon the plans that have become obsolete as a result of changes in the operating environment. Avoiding the plans obsolescence is critical, and this shows how the management can be more intentional, strategically focused, and adaptive through the implementation and its successful wrap-up.