Developing Your Strategy

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"How are you going to win in the period ahead?" That's the key question behind developing strategy.

To win at anything worthwhile, you need a game plan. Professional sports teams know this, and this idea applies to your organization, your department, your team – and even to yourself as an individual.

To be successful means knowing how to use your talent and resources to best advantage, and it's very difficult to "win" if you don't have this game plan in place.

This article introduces you to a common-sense, systematic approach to strategy development.

Approaches to Strategy

In a for-profit company, for which competition and profitability are important, your goals will differ from those of a nonprofit or government department. Likewise, objectives for a department or team will have a different scope from objectives for your organization as a whole.

For example, and depending on scope and circumstances, you may want to develop strategies to:

Increase profitability.
Gain more market share.
Increase approval ratings, or boost customer satisfaction.
Complete a project under budget.
To determine your strategy, you must understand fully the internal and external environmental factors that affect you. With that understanding, you can identify your clear advantages and use these to be successful. From there, you can make informed choices and implement your strategy effectively.
So, strategy creation follows a three-stage process:

Analyzing the context in which you're operating.
Identifying strategic options.
Evaluating and selecting the best options.
We'll look at this process, and review some useful tools that can help you develop your strategy.

Stage 1: Analyzing Your Context and Environment

In this first stage, you ensure that you fully understand yourself and your environment. Do the following:

Analyze Your Organization
Firstly, examine your resources, liabilities, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. A SWOT Analysis Add to My Personal Learning Plan is a great tool for uncovering what you do well and where you have weaknesses, providing that you use it rigorously. It's much easier to achieve your objectives when your strategy uses your strengths without exposing your weaknesses.

Also, look at your Core Competencies Add to My Personal Learning Plan. These highlight your unique strengths, and help you think about how you can set yourself apart from your competitors.

Analyze Your Environment
Now you need to examine your current operating environment to predict where things are moving. Are there exciting opportunities that you should pursue? What future scenarios are likely in your industry, and how will these impact the work that you do?

PEST Analysis Add to My Personal Learning Plan, Porter's Diamond Add to My Personal Learning Plan, and Porter's Five Forces Add to My Personal Learning Plan are great starting points for analyzing your environment. They show where you have a strong position within the larger environment, and where you may have issues.

As you prepare to create your strategy, make sure that you're working in a way that's aligned with changes in your operating environment, rather than working against them. These external factors are often beyond your control, so if you pursue a strategy that requires a change in one of these elements, you may have a long, exhausting, unprofitable battle ahead of you.


https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/developing-strategy.htm