Five Common Mistakes in Strategic Planning

The author, Mike Branton, is president of XL Design Professionals Management Services Corporation, XL Design Professional’s management consulting subsidiary. XL Design Professionals MSC delivers strategic planning services as well as other business management consulting services to A/E/E and related firms. He can be reached toll-free at 888.919.2121, extension 106, or at mike_branton@rsausa.com.

XL Design Professional's Management Services Corporation has noted some common mistakes made by A/E/E firms in their strategic planning process. By avoiding these miscues, you can prevent the development of a strategic plan that is superficial, unsubstantiated, ineffective and sure to gather dust faster than a fake plant in the lobby.

These mistakes include:

• Treating strategic planning as an event and not as a process. This ensures that the resulting plan will not be thought about except for one or two days during an off-site meeting or "retreat." Market changes and shifts don’t happen only from October to February. A/E/E executives must be constantly assessing whether the plan is delivering the intended results or not.
• Gathering input only from top management, yet inviting as many people as can physically fit into that off-site meeting location to promote buy-in. The meeting will accomplish very little. Many people will not be adequately informed to constructively participate. Attempts will be made to please everyone. Whatever strategic initiatives come out of the meeting will be so diluted that instead of being value creating, they will be value destroying.
• Brainstorming about all the possible opportunities the firm can pursue without supporting market/client research or analysis of the required resources. In other words, the group will have "hunches" about the potential of opportunities and they may assume that enough money will be available to execute a plan.
• Spending a significant amount of time on internally focused initia-tives. A strategic plan focuses externally. The business plan that supports the strategic plan will incorporate necessary internal elements. Many times this internal focus is found in the firm’s mission statement, resulting in one that is not memorable, too long, and could apply to any other A/E/E firm. It contains phrases like "hire only the best people," "on-time and on-budget" and "reasonable profit."
• Doing a poor job managing the implementation of the plan. Many firms talk a lot about how the off-site meeting facilitated team building. They document the plan by going to the expense of publishing and distributing it, but with no explanation about how the plan was derived, who is accountable, or what it means to the firm’s future.

Avoiding these common mistakes will result in a stronger and better strategic plan for your firm.