Create a Plan: Quick bytes

Now that we've seen intensive details on strategy model, terminologies, plans, before you think it's all so damn hard, let me just break down the complex part of strategy planning into a very simple one! 

Do not let all the terminologies daunt you! Its the concepts that're more important. All you just need to understand is what they each mean! 

Let's consider an example of a bike manufacturer whose strategic plan we're going to build!

Plan Details: Just as the name of each entity says, it is just all it is! Give it a relevant title, optimistic due dates, and add collaborators, and you're on!

• Focus Areas: High-level categories that groups your objectives or outcomes. These can be 
  • Aggressive Growth
  • Top Place to work
  • Best-in-class Bike Manufacturer
  • Sustainability and Adaptability, and so on.
• Objectives: These're the outcomes that you wish and work for! Let's just consider "Aggressive Growth" focus area. The objectives under this can be
  • Grow in a healthy and sustainable manner
  • Achieve ARR of 30m
  • Blow away the competition
  • Increase market share, and so on. 

You can evaluate the success of these objectives using

• Actions: Specific tasks to do in order to achieve the objectives. Let's consider the objective "Grow in a healthy and sustainable manner"! The actions can be
  • Adoption of EV in fleet transmissions
  • Increase investment in innovation on non-fossil fuel dependencies and internal combustion engine offerings
  • Aim for water positive certification in a few manufacturing units
  • Expand in Electric Vehicles segment and offer its services in global market, and so on.
• Measures: Key performance indicators (KPIs), or metrics, that explicitly measure whether or not you actually achieved the Objectives. Let's consider the objective "Grow in a healthy and sustainable manner"! The measures can be
  • Sustainable overall spend (in %)
  • Number of electric operated bikes
  • Reduction in Carbon footprint
  • Percentage of electric fleet (cargo) for transportation, and so on.
• Contributing Objectives: These are linked objectives that impact the success. The contributing objectives for the objective "Grow in a healthy and sustainable manner" can be
  • Include sustainability as a facet in supply-chain operations
  • ESG compliances
  • Transport to be carbon-neutral
• Projects: A group of actions executed to achieve the desired outcome. Projects have "actions" nested underneath them. Let's consider the objective "Grow in a healthy and sustainable manner"! The project and the associated actions can be
  • Project: Enable ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) parameters to grow sustainably
    • Action: Explore and implement ESG parameters in policies and operations
    • Action: Increase dependency on alternate fuels
    • Action: Implement community outreach and welfare programs

In a nutshell, these will help your team to focus on executing their plans:

• Objectives are simple, clear, and have a specific outcome
• Actions are specific tasks that help you get there
• Measures are quantitative, time-bound KPIs

This is it! Hope you got an idea of what it is! Now just open Cascade in an other tab, take some inspiration from here, and start strategizing!!