Strategic Planning

The ACI Growth Strategies™ – Strategic Planning Process

Our process is “the most rigorous, measurable and easily implemented strategic planning process” our clients have ever seen. Your future depends on it.

The Avantt Consulting Growth Strategies™ is an extraordinarily powerful Strategic Planning process that provides a method to drive the future of the organization and determine what organizational resources will be needed to ensure success – including the Return on Investment (ROI). The process involves determining what business opportunities exist, what barriers, both internal and external exist, developing strategies to overcome them, and identifying what resources are needed to capitalize on those opportunities.

Business leaders today have found that leaving the future to chance usually leads to disaster. An effective strategy and plan are the key to future success. The effective implementation of the plan is as important, or in some instances even more important, than the plan itself. Implementation is the true determining factor as to whether or not a company is successful.  If the implementation is not thought through with at least the same rigor as the strategic plan, then why bother with the strategy effort in the first place?

Avantt Consulting has provided strategic planning services to a wide variety of organizations from non-profits to entrepreneurial startups to divisions of multinational corporations. Our process uses an enhanced version of a licensed process used over decades by thousands of firms world-wide as an assurance to our clients that they are receiving the highest quality products and services. ACI has further developed the process, benchmarked it against world class organizations. The process design is based on the principles of the Balanced Scorecard and avoids the trap of “group think” common to nearly all strategic planning efforts by using the Delphi technique.

One of the unique characteristics of our process is our focus on implementation. The output of the strategic planning process includes:

  • A One Page Strategic Plan™ that reduces the entire strategic plan to one page for ease of communication and measurement of implementation process
  • A detailed Action Plan linked to each strategic goal in the Strategic Plan that provides action steps, assigns responsibilities, metrics, deliverables and due dates.
  • Resource Scoping Plans that outline resources required to implement each strategic goal – which allows up-front tradeoffs of resources against priorities and an assessment of the total cost of implementation
  • The output of the strategic planning process work sessions to fully document the Strategic Plan

 

Key Areas:

  • Vision and Values
  • Core Competencies Assessment
  • External Assessments: Market Segments and Opportunities, Competitive Analysis, and Trend Analysis
  • Internal Appraisal: Structure and Function, Operational Strategy, Quality Systems, Intellectual Capital, Change Management
  • Mission
  • Critical Success Factors
  • Sales, Marketing, and Financial Strategies
  • Human Resource, Information Technology, Market & Resource Acquisition
  • Implementation and control

The end result of the process is what clients describe as “the most rigorous, highly structured, and easily implemented strategic planning process” available. And yet, with that level of structure and rigor, the process is also highly flexible – it can be adapted in depth and scope for the circumstances of the client.  Long term, the Growth Strategies tool becomes an ongoing part of the organization’s planning process as it is easily updated from any location at any time.