Why implementation plan

Sadly, the majority of companies who have strategic plans fail to implement them. According to Fortune Magazine, nine out of ten organizations fail to implement their strategic plan for many reasons:.

A strategic plan provides a business with the roadmap it needs to pursue a specific strategic direction and set of performance goals, deliver customer value, and be successful. For those businesses that have a plan in place, wasting time and energy on the planning process and then not implementing the plan is very discouraging.

The strategic plan addresses the what and why of activities, but implementation addresses the who, where, when, and how. The fact is that both pieces are critical to success.

In fact, companies can gain competitive advantage through implementation if done effectively. Because you want your plan to succeed, heed the advice here and stay away from the pitfalls of implementing your strategic plan. Here are the most common reasons strategic plans fail:. Before you start this process, evaluate your strategic plan and how you may implement it by answering a few questions to keep yourself in check. Often overlooked are the five key components necessary to support implementation: people, resources, structure, systems, and culture.

All components must be in place in order to move from creating the plan to activating the plan. The first stage of implementing your plan is to make sure to have the right people on board. The right people include those folks with required competencies and skills that are needed to support the plan. In the months following the planning process, expand employee skills through training, recruitment, or new hires to include new competencies required by the strategic plan.

You need to have sufficient funds and enough time to support implementation. Often, true costs are underestimated or not identified. True costs can include a realistic time commitment from staff to achieve a goal, a clear identification of expenses associated with a tactic, or unexpected cost overruns by a vendor. Set your structure of management and appropriate lines of authority, and have clear, open lines of communication with your employees.

A plan owner and regular strategy meetings are the two easiest ways to put a structure in place. Meetings to review the progress should be scheduled monthly or quarterly, depending on the level of activity and time frame of the plan. Both management and technology systems help track the progress of the plan and make it faster to adapt to changes.

As part of the system, build milestones into the plan that must be achieved within a specific time frame. A scorecard is one tool used by many organizations that incorporates progress tracking and milestones. To reinforce the importance of focusing on strategy and vision, reward success. Develop some creative positive and negative consequences for achieving or not achieving the strategy.

The rewards may be big or small, as long as they lift the strategy above the day-to-day so people make it a priority. Implementing your plan includes several different pieces and can sometimes feel like it needs another plan of its own.

Use the steps below as your base implementation plan. Great article , I am an MBA student from kenya and am intending to research on factors that influence the implementaton of strategic plans in kenyan schools. Any idea on the relevant objectives and theories for my theoretical review and framework will be highly appreciated. Here are some of the many benefits of an implementation plan:. Writing an implementation plan gives you better clarity of thought and improves your own understanding of the project.

When you are forced to think things through, you are better able to document as well as communicate the plan to team members, upper management, and get everyone on board. Your implementation plan lays down exactly what tasks need to be done, how to do them, who needs to do them, keeping everyone on board, and removing any sort of confusion or doubts.

Working on projects requires the cooperation and collaboration of many employees. The better the cooperation amongst team members, the better the synergy and the overall execution. By creating and communicating your implementation plan, you can not only assign responsibilities to team members but can also educate them about how their work affects the work of their peers and how it all fits in the broader organizational vision.

When you have a solid implementation plan that is well researched, documented, and presented, you ensure buy-in from all key stakeholders of your organization. Every implementation plan comprises of some key components that need to be analyzed and thought-through before communicating the plan with your team:.

What do you want to accomplish? What is the project scope? Why are these goals important? How do these goals fit into the overall organizational vision and mission? Assign Responsibilities: Assigning roles and responsibilities provides a clear picture of what needs to be done and by whom.

The clearer you define these responsibilities, the easier it will be to keep people accountable. Resource Allocation: One of the main purposes of an implementation plan is to make sure that your team has access to enough resources in order to execute the plan effectively and without any hiccups.

Define Metrics: How will you determine project success? Every implementation plan must identify KPIs Key Performance Indicators to establish how it will measure success and failure. This also allows you to measure progress and celebrate milestones to keep the team excited.

Contingency Plan : Planning for challenges is as important as planning for success. When creating such a document, you need to be more detailed and thorough, explaining everything clearly to all team members who will be viewing this document. Kickoff your implementation plan with a brief introduction, outlining the vision, mission, and purpose of your project or initiative.

You can additionally include how this project ties up with the overall organizational mission and lay down all the assumptions or limitations of your project. In this segment, you can describe the team involved in the implementation of the project. Include the names, roles, and responsibilities of key project stakeholders, and key points of contact. This is an important area in your implementation plan as here you need to describe the key tasks and steps involved in the implementation of the strategy.

If you have already begun with a task, note down the status and progress of the task in this section. An implementation schedule outlines project timeframes and milestones. An implementation plan is often presented as a written document or planned in a project management solution. The latter is a better fit for this particular roadmap because, as you can probably tell, implementation plans are complex and comprehensive.

Implementation plans should all contain solutions for:. The benefits of implementation planning range from organizational to relationship-building to increased profitability. A solid implementation plan:. The process of creating an implementation plan is time consuming. Most of the tasks involved require you to wait on communication or approvals from multiple stakeholders.

The process also requires lots of research, goal-setting, gathering or defining of resources, and getting team availability together. Avoid planning too early by waiting until the project is officially greenlit. The definition of greenlit means something different to every agency.

However, most would agree that a signed contract and successful deposit payment are good markers. After those client onboarding tasks are complete, you can begin implementation planning. An implementation timeline is a visual representation of all project-related due dates. That includes:.