Most businesses have a unique strategies that are designed to generate wealth by combining their strengths with their available resources. Strategic managers plan products and services to meet current and predicted market trends. The strategic implementation process involves putting these plans into action. Implementation processes are as varied as strategic plans, but certain strategic business techniques reoccur throughout many individual business strategies. To choose the best strategic implementation process, determine your business' short-term and long-term goals, prioritize those goals, and identify certain measurable criteria that will help determine your strategy's level of success.
A short-term strategic implementation process supports long-term strategy. For example, a business might have a long-term strategy that involves a 30 percent revenue gain over five years and an accompanying short-term strategy that involves a 0.5 percent sales gain every month for the next three months. Short-term implementation requires a lot of communication and physical coordination of employees working on tasks. Each finished task moves the business toward the completion of strategic goals.
Every strategic implementation process should have objectives with measurable activities and outcomes. Examples of measurable outcomes include total sales, customer satisfaction ratings, productivity and expense reduction. Business managers use these measurements to evaluate and control staff members and to ensure that departments and teams stay on track while working toward strategic goals.
Many business strategists choose to use prioritization as part of the strategic implementation process. The strategists order short-term tasks according what the company values and what is most important to the overall strategic goal. Companies that are attempting to boost sales will have different priorities from those of companies that are attempting to cut costs, even though both companies might have the same tasks in their short-term goal set.
In business, the term "cascading" refers to the process of linking short-term goals to long-term goals. This is the turning point of the strategic implementation process, where the business activity and environment begins to resemble what was outlined in the strategic plan. The process is called cascading because measurable objectives meld together 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 the written ideas in a strategic plan. Finance, marketing, production, human resources and operations carry out functional tactics that must be managed with consideration to the priorities of the strategic implementation process. Strategists evaluate the company’s activity chain to determine which employees should carry out specific functional tactics that are related to the implementation of the strategic plan.
