Even the all-time-laid plans can go amiss—strategic planning teams know this as much every bit anyone. Carefully crafted strategies may non necessarily lead yous astray, only they volition well-nigh always change and evolve during their standard iii- to five-year implementation. It'due south just a fact that your internal and external environments volition change and touch on your strategy equally information technology's being implemented. For this reason, it's incredibly important to create systems of evaluation and command to monitor your arrangement's performance. Establishing a command process as part of strategic management allows you to immediately course-correct if planned strategies cause unintended or unexpected results.

Establishing a control procedure as part of strategic management allows you to immediately class-right if planned strategies cause unintended or unexpected results. Click To Tweet

In this article, we'll walk you through the diverse components of a strategic control procedure and how an organisation might apply them.

What is strategic control?

Strategic command is a style to manage the execution of your strategic plan. As a management process, it's unique in that information technology'due south congenital to handle unknowns and ambiguity as it tracks a strategy's implementation and subsequent results. Information technology is primarily concerned with finding and helping y'all adapt to internal or external factors that affect your strategy, whether they were initially included in your strategic planning or not.

The various components of the strategic control process generate answers to these two questions:

  1. Has the strategy been implemented as planned?
  2. Based on the observed results, does the strategy need to be changed or adapted?

In many senses, strategic control is an evaluation exercise focused on ensuring the achievement of your goals. The process bridges gaps and allows you to adapt your strategy as needed during implementation.

The divergence between operational and strategic command processes.

In dissimilarity to the large corporeality of data and extended time frame required for strategic controls to accept effect, operational controls monitor and evaluate solar day-to-24-hour interval functions to correct any issues as soon as possible. Operational controls may exist either transmission or automatic, and tin involve people, processes, and applied science. When successful, they flag potential risks, identify misalignments betwixt plans and actions, and finer implement changes to stay on course with your strategy.

For example, if there are technical malfunctions or performance is beneath expectations, operational command processes can initiate a course correction rapidly. This could include updating an Information technology organization or retraining particular employees, respectively. Or, imagine a manufactory that produces widgets. If the number of widgets drops below expectations or the fault rate rises above expectations, a process control alert should be triggered to make the proper operational change.

Strategic control, on the other hand, might then evaluate whether your hiring criteria and employee onboarding processes need aligning in society to reach your strategy.

Learn how to implement your strategy with this 41-page strategy execution toolkit.

Strategic Control Techniques

At that place are iv primary types of strategic control:

Premise Control

Every arrangement creates a strategy based on sure assumptions, or premises. As such, premise command is designed to continually and systematically verify whether those assumptions, which are foundational to your strategy, are still true. These are typically environmental (east.thou. economical or political shifts) or manufacture-specific (e.g. new competitors) variables.

The sooner you lot discover a false premise, the sooner you tin can adjust the aspects of your strategy that it affects. In reality, you can't review every single strategic premise, so focus on those most likely to change or take a major impact on your strategy.

Implementation Control

This blazon of control is a step-by-stride assessment of implementation activities. It focuses on the incremental actions and phases of strategic implementation, and monitors events and results as they unfold. Is each action or project happening equally planned? Are the proper resources and funds being allocated for each step? This process continually questions the basic direction of your strategy to ensure it's the right one.

There are 2 subcategories of implementation command:

  • Monitoring Strategic Thrusts Or Projects

This is the assessment of specific projects or thrusts that have been created to drive the larger strategy. This early feedback will assist you decide whether to proceed onward with the strategy as is or suspension to make adjustments.

You lot can pre-determine which thrusts are critical to the achievement of your goals and continually assess them. Or, you lot can decide which measurements are most meaningful for your thrusts or projects (such every bit timeframes, costs, etc.) and use that data as an indicator of whether a thrust is on rails or not, and how that may subsequently affect the strategy.

  • Reviewing Milestones

During strategic planning, you likely identified important points in the implementation procedure. When these milestones are reached, your organization volition reassess the strategy and its relevance. Milestones could exist based on timeframes, such equally the end of a quarter, or on pregnant actions, such as large upkeep or resource allocations.

Implementation control can also take place via operational control systems, like budgets, schedules, and central performance indicators.

Special Alert Control

When something unexpected happens, a special alert control is mobilized. This is a reactive process, designed to execute a fast and thorough strategy assessment in the wake of an extreme consequence that impacts an organization. The outcome could exist anything from a natural disaster or product call back to a competitor conquering. In some cases, a special alert control calls for the formation of a crisis team—usually comprising members of the strategic planning and leadership teams—and in others, it only ways activating a predetermined contingency programme.

Strategic Surveillance Command

Strategic surveillance is a broader information scan. Its purpose is to identify disregarded factors both within and outside the company that might impact your strategy. This process ideally covers any "ground" that might be missed past the more focused tactics of premise and implementation command. Your surveillance could encompass industry publications, online or social mentions, industry trends, conference activities, etc.

This graph clearly depicts the application of the 4 techniques for strategic control and how they function alongside each other:

Source

Half-dozen Steps Of The Strategic Command Process

Whether your system is using one or all iv of the previous techniques of strategic evaluation and control, each involves half dozen steps:

  • Determine what to control.

What are the organization'south goals? What elements direct relate to your mission and vision? Information technology's difficult, but you must prioritize what to control because you cannot monitor and assess every minute factor that might impact your strategy.

  • Gear up standards.

What volition you compare performance confronting? How can managers evaluate past, present, and time to come actions? Setting control standards—which tin can be quantitative or qualitative—helps determine how y'all will measure your goals and evaluate progress.

  • Measure performance.

Once standards are set, the next stride is to measure your operation. Measurement tin can then be addressed in monthly or quarterly review meetings. What is actually happening? Are the standards being met?

  • Compare performance.

When compared to the standards or targets, how do the actuals measure upward? Competitive benchmarking can help you decide if whatsoever gaps betwixt targets and actuals are normal for the industry, or are signs of an internal problem.

  • Analyze deviations.

Why was functioning below standards? In this step, y'all'll focus on uncovering what caused the deviations. Did you lot set the correct standards? Was at that place an internal outcome, such as a resources shortage, that could be controlled in the future? Or an external, uncontrollable cistron, like an economic plummet?

  • Decide if corrective activity is needed.

Once you've determined why performance deviated from standards, you'll decide what to do well-nigh it. What actions volition correct performance? Exercise goals need to exist adapted? Or are there internal shifts you can make to bring functioning up to par? Depending on the cause of each deviation, yous'll either decide to have action to correct performance, revise the standard, or take no activeness.

Using A Balanced Scorecard For Strategic Control

The entire strategic planning, implementation, and control procedure takes meaning effort and thought. Information technology requires a lot of buy-in from your leadership squad. It besides requires employees to sympathize why their actions are important and continuously work toward achievement of goals—even if those goals shift over time.

A Balanced Scorecard helps tie your overall strategy to those day-to-solar day activities, giving more clarity about the what and why of strategic implementation to the entire company. You'll be able to do both operational and strategic command inside one framework, linking the two processes and getting everyone on the same page. The Counterbalanced Scorecard arroyo tin provide a clear prescription as to what companies should measure during implementation to enact strategic control.

Learn everything you lot need to know about Balanced Scorecards in this article.

Conclusion

Putting strategic control in place is critical to a successful strategy implementation. Without proper controls, your strategy won't have the gut checks required to ensure it remains relevant, on track, and performing at or in a higher place standards.

Managing these controls can be fabricated easier by using software to rails KPIs, measures, and the external factors effectually your strategy. At ClearPoint, we see many organizations using our software to take strategic control.

Strategic Control: Breaking Down The Process & Techniques