Strategic managers plan products and services to meet market trends, with implementation processes varying. Short-term goals support long-term strategies, with measurable results used to evaluate progress. Prioritization and functional tactics are also important in the implementation process.
Most companies have unique strategies designed to generate wealth by combining their strengths with available resources. Strategic managers plan products and services to meet current and projected market trends. The strategic implementation process involves putting these plans into action. Implementation processes are as varied as strategic plans, but some strategic business techniques recur in many individual business strategies. To choose the best strategic implementation process, determine your company’s short- and long-term goals, prioritize those goals, and identify certain measurable criteria that will help determine the level of success of your strategy.
A short-term strategic implementation process supports the long-term strategy. For example, a company might have a long-term strategy that calls for a 30 percent gain over five years and a short-term strategy that calls for a 0.5 percent gain each month for the next three months. Short-term implementation requires a lot of communication and physical coordination of employees performing tasks. Each finished task moves the activity towards the completion of strategic objectives.
Every strategic implementation process should have goals with measurable activities and results. Examples of measurable results include total sales, customer satisfaction ratings, productivity and expense reduction. Business managers use these metrics to evaluate and monitor staff members and to ensure departments and teams stay on track as they work toward strategic goals.
Many business strategists choose to use prioritization as part of the strategic implementation process. Strategists sort short-term tasks based on what the company values and what is most important to the overall strategic goal. Companies that are attempting to increase sales will have different priorities than companies that are attempting to reduce costs, even though both companies may have the same tasks in their short-term set of goals.
In the business world, the term “waterfall” refers to the process of linking short-term goals to long-term goals. This is the turning point in the strategic implementation process, where the business and business environment begin to resemble what is outlined in the strategic plan. The process is called a waterfall because measurable goals merge to create a pool of integrated longer-term goals. When choosing how to implement a strategic plan, many executives also determine when and how to recognize cascading milestones.
Functional tactics are the routine activities that create a physical reality from ideas written in a strategic plan. Finance, marketing, manufacturing, HR, and operations perform functional tactics that need to be managed with the priorities of the strategic implementation process in mind. Strategists evaluate the company’s business chain to determine which employees need to implement specific functional tactics related to the implementation of the strategic plan.
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