Business Strategy and Planning Toolkit Training Course

Many managers spend too much time on the functional aspects of their business, usually at the detriment of strategy and planning. In just two action-packed days you will benefit from practical exposure to the key strategic skills every manager must possess. Topics covered include:

• Analysing your business from a strategic perspective
• Demystifying the complexities of strategy
• Appreciating how strategy and business planning compliment each other
• Preparing and developing your business plans for future challenges
• Understanding and capitalising on competitive advantages
• Improving your decisions on resource allocation
• Utilising the tools and techniques of business analysis
• Developing robust strategic thinking skills
• Using traditional and non-traditional metrics to measure business performance
• How to challenge current processes and look for a culture of continuous value improvement

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Strategy Thinking and Mindset

• Understanding the significance of 'frames of reference'
• A review of people's thinking styles and their influence on strategy
• Getting to grips with the concepts of 'big picture and detail' planning
• The importance of 'Theory U' and 'Presencing' for truly effective change
• Creativity and it's central place in the planning mindset

Setting the Strategic and Business Planning Framework

• Organisational planning and some concepts behind them
• The difference between corporate level and business level strategy
• Historical review of strategic development in the last 50 years
• The impact of both cultured and strategic leadership on the planning culture
• Appreciating the importance of competitive advantage
• Developing a ‘focus on the future’ for direction setting
• The archetypal ‘Hero’s Journey’; assessing and managing its progression
• Prioritising important and/or urgent actions
• Creating the one page strategic plan
• Answering the ‘why¬what¬how¬who’ questions of alignment
• Consider how ‘managing for value and values’ can drive the behaviours of a senior manager/director

Strategic Toolsets

People and Culture

• The keys to developing a corporate vision, mission and purpose
• Understanding Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Richard Barrett’s ‘7 Levels of Human Consciousness’ for cultural transformation
• Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ plus the ‘8th Habit’
• Corporate values assessment and culture surveys
• Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions
• Using Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) and insights to develop understanding
• Blanchard and the Situational Leadership Model
• Belbin’s Team Roles

Strategic Frameworks

• Development stages of the Strategic Evolution Framework
• Linking ‘Corporate Value to Individual Values’
• The Corporate Alignment Model (CAM)
• The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Model
• Scenario planning
• Storytelling
• McKinsey 7Ss framework
• Kaplan and Norton Strategy Maps
• Peter Senge – The Fifth Discipline

Strategic Tools

• Porter’s value chain
• Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal (PESTEL) analysis
• Strength Weakness Opportunity Threat (SWOT) analysis
• Using a Dynamic SWOT analysis for driving strategy
• Creating Strategic Activity Trees (SATs) for logic and communication
• Using the uncertainty and importance grid to prioritise key activities
• Cognitive and Causal Mapping
• Fishbone analysis of problems
• Wishbone analysis of potential
• Benchmarking for gap widening
• Introducing force field and stakeholder analysis

Products and Markets

• Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix
• Market Attractive Business Attractiveness (MABA) analysis
• Ansoff and modified Ansoff matrix
• GE/McKinsey multi¬factor matrix
• Life cycle analysis
• Directional policy matrix
• Porters competitive strategies
• The marketing mix – The 4 Ps
• Competitor profiling
• Gap analysis and perceptual mapping
• Porter’s five forces matrix

Financial

• Financial BCG development matrix
• Review of financial ratios including an Extended DuPont model
• Using the “value¬over¬time curve” for assessing financial attractiveness
• Developing budgets and forecasts
• Overhead analysis and costing including Activity Based Costing (ABC)
• Discounted Cash¬flow (DCF) for investment decisions
• Review the concepts of Value Based Management (VBM)

Implementation

• Length, style, format of a strategic or business plan
• Scenario storytelling – The first ingredients of a communication plan
• Using “From¬To” analysis to communicate the plan
• Using the “difficulty¬over¬time curve” to assess implementation difficulty
• Implementation plans
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Kaplan and Norton concept of the Balanced Score Card (BSC)

The course is designed to introduce you to the major issues around strategy and planning. The programme assumes no formal academic training in strategy, and will instead focus on how you can apply strategy and planning techniques in the real world. The programme will equip you with a “toolkit” of concepts and techniques that you can utilise and apply to your own business as and when required.