As the year winds down and a new year begins, most organizations’ focus is on dispensing with the past as quickly as possible. Managers are scrambling to close budgets, finish projects, and hope that year-end reporting and processes are completed successfully. Similarly, leaders are focused on closing the literal and figurative books on the past as quickly as possible so that they can begin their holiday break and focus on finishing their strategy for the following year.
A Strategy without the Past is no Strategy at all
This zeal for the future often extends to job function email list the strategic planning exercises that accompany a new calendar year. Perhaps it’s human nature to close out the past. I’ve seen many leaders gloss over whatever introductory elements of their strategic planning mention the past year’s successes, failures, and continuing efforts.
Whether it’s a formal part of your strategic plan or an exercise that serves as an input to it, you should begin your strategic planning with a formal and diligent analysis of the past.
This review should include at least 3 elements:
- An analysis of the market and external environment over the last 12 months. What significant changes occurred across technology, markets, and society?
- How did your portfolio of strategic projects fare over the past year? What were the primary causes of the successes and failures? Were they due to an internally-driven reason like budget or an external factor that you articulated in your analysis of the external environment?
Reflecting on the Environment
Understanding environmental events both why episodic sales training fails inside and outside your company also provides critical information to determine how your strategy performed when accounting for these events. For example, a strategy to roll out new technology to support in-person live events that launched in early 2020 was unlikely to be successful no matter how wonderful the technology or skillful the implementation team was.
Analyzing Your Portfolio Performance
Most organizations already have tools and methods for tracking the performance of their strategic portfolio but fail to look much beyond brazil data financial and delivery time metrics. Ask yourself if particular types of projects tended to perform differently than others, or if you are grouping your portfolio correctly.
Groupings based on the organizational structure, such as lumping all projects for the marketing department together, might make organizational sense, but probably miss other critical variances. For example, most of your cloud migration efforts could be struggling, but grouping them by organizational unit obscures that fact.