Find out when to review your strategic plan + 7 valuable tips to hit more goals

Strategic planningopens in a new tab is an essential document for any business. It is the basis for decision-making. It also directs every action toward the results set in advance.

Strategic planning is where you assess the company’s current scenario and set the goals to reach a larger medium- and long-term objective. However, for the strategic plan to actually benefit the organization, it needs to be reviewed periodically.

The aim is to make sure the company is on the right path and that the strategies adopted fit the organization’s reality.

In this article, you will better understand what a strategy review is and when to review your strategic business planning, and learn 7 best practices to adopt during the process:

1. Check whether the goals set earlier were met
2. See whether the budget has been enough to execute the strategic plan
3. Assess changes in the organization’s internal and external environment
4. Check trends and run surveys
5. Assess the points that need improvement
6. Redesign and implement new processes
7. Realign the plan

What is strategic planning?

To know when to review the strategic plan, we need to recall the meaning and application of the conceptopens in a new tab.

Strategic planning starts from an objective the company wants to reach. From that objective, goals are set along with the means to achieve them. The combination of that objective, the goals and the practices to be carried out forms the strategic plan.

To make your company’s initial strategic planning easier, three questions can be considered:

• Where does your company stand today?
• Where does it want to go?
• How will it get there?

From the answers, you will have more clarity about the processes that should be implemented.

Read also: 7 strategic planning tools and systems for your company!

Why is it necessary to reassess strategic planning?

The strategy review is nearly as important as building the plan. It is through this review that you can reinforce certain values and assess the possibility and need of resetting priorities.

It is also an important practice to make sure directors, managers and other employees are properly aligned with the organization’s mission, vision and values.

Reviewing the strategic plan is natural, since the path to success is made of mistakes and successes. Remember that mistakes can be the indicator you need to update approaches that no longer make the sense they made when the plan was first written.

That is because markets are increasingly dynamic and, as a result, a rigid plan that neither adapts nor evolves will do nothing for the company’s results.

Reassessing strategic planning is also necessary to recalculate the route and even change the final destination.

With the plan review, you can identify flaws along the way and keep them from happening again in the future.

Worth reading: What is Situational Strategic Planning: definition and how it works in practice

When should you review your strategic plan?

Besides the situation mentioned above, other aspects answer the question: “when should you review your strategic plan?” Check what they are:

Internal factors

Internal factors are not necessarily tied to problems. Recognizing the best time to review the strategic plan also requires a view of the market your company operates in.

Depending on the industry, changes are constant and call for a review every month. In other businesses, however, where changes happen slowly and goals are set with the long term in mind, 5 years may be the ideal interval for the review.

Another internal factor tied to the need to reassess strategic planning periodically is keeping employees motivated. Goals that are set but not constantly recalled or reviewed end up forgotten.

External factors

When thinking about when to review the strategic plan, it is also important to remember that factors outside the market can affect your business.

One example is the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemicopens in a new tab (in Portuguese), a major external factor that led many companies to review their strategic planning, relaxing goals and even changing how they operate.

7 tips on how and when to review your strategic plan

We have already covered what a strategy review is and when to review the strategic plan. Now we gathered 7 tips on how a manager can maintain the strategic plan more practically and objectively.

1. Check whether the goals set earlier were met

Our first tip for managers maintaining the strategic plan is to check whether the goals you had previously set were met. If the answer is “yes,” assess the practical results they brought.

If the answer is “no,” try to understand what was left undone for them to be reached. Or you can reassess those goals and ask yourself whether they still make sense for your business, given its current context.

Always keep in mind that you may need to redefine some goals and set new deadlines.

2. See whether the budget has been enough to execute the strategic plan

Another aspect that deserves your attention when reviewing the strategic plan is budget managementopens in a new tab (in Portuguese). Questions like these apply here:

• Are the planned resources enough to put your plan’s strategies into practice?
• Do they need to be redistributed?
• Is there a need to make cuts?
• If so, where exactly?

Assessing and understanding resource availability is crucial during the strategic plan review.

3. Assess changes in the organization’s internal and external environment

Since the last review of the strategic plan, what were the most significant changes in both the organization’s internal and external environment?

This is an extremely relevant question because, depending on the answer, it is quite likely that the strategies and methodologies set earlier are no longer valid.

4. Check trends and run surveys

To maintain the strategic plan, managers and employees should stay open to new trends and accurate solutions.

By surveying your audience and gathering data on competitors, you can better understand the current context your company operates in.

What does your audience expect from you? Have your audience’s needs changed since the last plan review? Have new competitors or a new market niche that is still unserved appeared?

Besides surveys, an analysis of competitors is important, so see how to do the Porter analysis (video in Portuguese):

5. Assess the points that need improvement

Adding up the information from all the items above, it will be easy to make a list of all the improvements and toolsopens in a new tab to consider and turn into goals for the next period of strategic planning.

6. Redesign and implement new processes

Setting up new departments and installing new programs may mean some processes need to be redesignedopens in a new tab (in Portuguese).

So try to understand how they currently work and identify bottlenecks to be controlled and steps that can be removed or added.

In other words, redesign processes so that employees have the means to do their work and reach the next goals.

7. Realign the plan

Finally, the plan should be reshaped and spread across the whole company. The strategic plan should not be a document accessible only to management. Every professional should have access to it, so it is clear what the goals are and how they will be reached.

See also: Advantages and disadvantages of strategic planning: is it really worth it?

Next steps

Analyze all your company’s data with efficient software

Besides knowing when to review the strategic plan and how to put it into practice, it is essential to have a mechanism that aligns data across the whole company and makes it easier to track performance.

For that, get to know Stratwsopens in a new tab, corporate management software that will make your strategic planning an efficient tool, through information integration and ease of use, speeding up decision-making.

This software has already won over more than a thousand companies in Brazil and around the world, because it offers several important features for strategic planning. Here are some of them:

• Integrate people, operations and strategy;
• Find improvement opportunities;
• Manage meetings and the project portfolio;
• Use the main strategic planning methodologies, such as BSC, OKR and SWOTopens in a new tab;
• Create and track KPIs for processes, projects and people;
• Share information quickly and transparently;
• Use meritocracy and visual management to motivate and manage teams.

And if you want to build or review a strong strategic plan for your business, download our free e-book (in Portuguese): Como fazer Gestão Estratégica?opens in a new tab