As part of the product development process for RapidInfluence we had numerous sessions with individuals both inside and outside of our target market. The purpose of these discussions were to work through the premises of our Strategic Planning Manifesto and to preview the first version of our product.

1. The most important thing to know about your strategic plan.
Original Blog Post: http://www.rapidinfluence.com/blog-0/bid/9998/The-most-important-thing-to-
know-about-your-strategic-plan
As part of the product development process for RapidInfluence we had numerous
sessions with individuals both inside and outside of our target market. The purpose of
these discussions were to work through the premises of our Strategic Planning
Manifesto and to preview the first version of our product.
One of the more insightful sessions we had was with Ian Smith of Portfolio Partnership
and the author of The Smith Report, a must read for growth companies. In our session
we discussed the need for companies to create strategic plans and more importantly to
implement them. During our discussion, Ian rightly pointed out that success in strategic
plan implementation was largely dependent on knowing what the status of various
action items are within the strategic plan.
In effect, if a manager doesn't have an easy way to see what is happening with the
strategic plan then it becomes very difficult for them to actually guide people through
the strategic plan implementation.
During the product development process we had already decided that having measures
like percentage completed for an action item was too subjective because one person's
50% complete might be another person's 70% complete so we had scaled it back to the
idea of 'started' and 'not started' however, Ian pointed out that this didn't really give
someone a 'call to action'.
Since we were all about calls to action Ian suggested that knowing things like whether
an action item was 'on schedule' or 'behind schedule' are the real bits of knowledge that
a driver of strategy wants to know because that then signals them to take action.
If a manager wants to ensure that they are on top of the strategic plan implementation
process and that they have the right resources in the right place then they need to know
which action items are behind schedule so that they can go and help those people who
are responsible for those action items, giving the the extra assistance that they need to
get back on track.

2. Given that feedback, we changed our various status options for action items and plan
elements to in our product to:
• Not started
• Behind schedule
• On schedule
• Ahead of schedule
This gave us a much more useful and informative dashboard view of the various
strategic initiatives that were taking place:
This really helped us refine the product and it was agreed by others in future sessions to
be a really important way to think about the strategic plan implementation process.
Summary, if you are implementing a strategic plan you will live and breath by the
actions of that plan and in order to increase your level of success then your strategic
planning dashboard had better be telling you what is going on and in particular what
parts of that plan are behind schedule so that you can marshall up the resources and
get those actions back on track.
Ed Loessi