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Four Steps to Align Your Organization to its Strategic Plan

Written by Richard Lannon on . Posted in Articles.

Often we want all the moving parts to connect together in our business. We want everything and everybody rowing in the same direction together. This is not always easy to accomplish.

In today’s competitive climate with global competition we need to break down internal barriers and align the strategic thinking and goals and objectives of our departments.

The starting point is to ensure that you have developed the key strategic vision and mission along with our strategic agenda items. Once that is complete alignment planning as part of the strategic planning process can be embraced. 

Alignment planning as part of your strategic planning initiative seeks to accomplish three main objectives:

  • ensure strong connection among the organization’s mission and its operational resources
  • fine tune departmental goals and objectives and discover implementation gaps
  • address issues that may exist around internal efficiencies and effectiveness.

There are generally four steps to the Alignment Planning Process for the strategic planning team to engage in. These include:

  1. Outline the organization’s mission, programs, resources, and needed support areas
  2. Identify what’s working well and what needs to be adjusted
  3. Identify how these adjustments should be made and determine the best approach
  4. Include the adjustments as strategies in the strategic plan and roadmap with an alignment path

The challenge with the Alignment Planning is that you require a solid model to follow prior to applying it. You must have gone through a proper strategic planning approach to ensure your have identified and defined the direction of the organization.

If that work is done then you can benefit from bringing your strategic plans to the department and management level. You can engage them in the process of aligning the organization. Your management can help you engage the employees to avoid disconnects between your business strategy and operational reality. The final objective is to link the strategic and operations to establish employee commitment and motivation.

Alignment planning is part of the overall process when making plans for your organization. It is important that you embrace the need to establish business alignment.

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