The strategy sets out how an organization is planning to utilize its resources, including the knowledge and skills of its employees as well as financial and material assets, in order to achieve their requisite goals and overall objectives, and their company vision. Strategy development can be simply defined as the process which helps the organization to get to the stage or point where they want to be in the future. This strategy development process requires you to identify strategic options available, research, concisely choosing the most promising options, and deciding how resources will be allocated across the organization to achieve objectives. Let’s discuss the six best options with which you can level up your strategic leadership skills.
1. Business Case Development
The business case development analyzes the necessary information about the business investments relevant to a critical decision-making process in the future. Be it a sales pitch, business ventures, organization relocation, developments required in the promotion of the products and services which is company offering or any other future requirements. In simple words, it can be your sales pitch that accumulates all the points required for pitching. The business case is one of the best ways to identify as well as evaluate alternatives available and to compare their relative pros and cons. Brownie points that you should mention in your business case-
- Risk involved
- Returns expected
- Investment required
- Benefits foreseen
- Time and financial break-even
The sole purpose of the business case is to outline and strategize the organization’s plans and goals through a project or thorough study.
2. External Market Analysis
External analysis is a process of examining the pertaining industrial environment of a company. These factors include competitive position, competitive structure, dynamics, and market history. This analysis also includes majorly macroeconomics that consists of dynamics, social, demographic, political, global, political, and technological changes. The question remains the same how it can help you?
- Allow you to understand your competition better
- Get an idea of how marketers are handling risks and converting more leads. For example, getting a brief analysis of demand-supply statistics.
- Degree of increase in competition and developments in the technology
- Get to know what are the influencing external factors in your industry
- Analyze potential business opportunities and threats coming their way in future
- A thorough idea of companies position in the market relative to other competitors in the industry.
The purpose of this analysis is to understand the differences between you and your market competitors and how you have any potential opportunities to level up your business. It can determine the growth, profitability, and volatility of the market.
3. What If Analysis & Scenario Planning
What-if analysis is an idea initially every business goes through but have you reached the endpoint? Reaching to the correct conclusion is something that matters the most. Somewhat most of us analyze potential outcomes based on the recent instances. This is rational to say, that it gives the organization the power to understand the market situation that can affect your business goals and how you should plan for those uncertainties.
This is a thorough analysis of external market to understand what are the most popular financial impacts that can affect your business. You can also effectively compare the results by processing the decisions and planning after comparing past sales with the best sales. Yes, you heard it right! This analysis will give you an idea what were the changes and improvements that helped you to excel in the market once. To make it more informative you can go for multivariate models to understand many variables that affect your business at the same time.
4. Facilitating discussion forums
This isn’t as easy as we think as we all like to speak and many of us don’t listen as well as we could or should. It is important to focus and direct the discussion, with elements such as identifying areas of agreement and disagreement, sharing meaning, and seeking to reach consensus before moving on. Allow people around you to come up with something creative and useful for your business development. Be it board meetings or lunch meetups you should have an idea what are the points you want to work on with the creative employees of your organization and how you are portraying your ideas in front of them.
5. Capacity planning
Capacity planning is the process of analyzing the production capacity which is needed by an organization to manage changing demands for the products as well as services. In this process you should cover both long-term and short-term capacity needs. Moreover, you also have to plan a process to meet these uncertainties accordingly. How capacity planning will affect your business?
- Getting an overview of the existing capacity availability
- Identify the best ways or alternatives to rectify future needs
- Evaluate the economical, financial, and technological availability of your firm
- Choosing the best alternatives that suit your companies strategic plans and missions
6. Project Planning
Project planning is a process of segregating the activities into certain steps. One view of project planning divides the activity into these steps: setting measurable objectives, identifying deliverables, scheduling, and planning tasks, and agreeing and allocating the budget. This process will help you determine four main factors which are objectives, goals, scope, and schedule. Why this project planning is important for your management?
- Facilitate the stakeholders and sponsors in understanding what is required and at which points.
- Enables the management to manage effective monitoring
- Effectively determine and rectify project risks
- Help in determining the right authoritative person for performing a particular task
- Generate feedbacks to cover the loopholes for any future project planning