Tuesday, November 18, 2008

How to Evaluate Your Opportunities Strategically

With the lingering uncertainty surrounding the recent world market upheavals, many organizations are being forced to think about strategic business planning now more than ever before. ?Being strategic is about making choices,? says Erica Olsen, founder of M3 Planning, a nationwide leader in on-demand strategic planning tools and performance management software. She cautions, however, that there is no fail-safe method for evaluating strategic choices. Instead, Olsen advises her clients to establish a set of parameters or rules that are specific and unique to their operating environment and use these rules to judge any and all strategic choices out there.

?By establishing a set of rules, you can quickly evaluate whether an opportunity is really an opportunity or just a distraction,? says Olsen. She offers the following categories to use as a litmus test:

-Priority rule. With this rule, you prioritize some opportunities over others based on their connection to reaching your vision.

-Timing rule. This financial rule helps you prioritize opportunities based on how much money you want to see returned within what time period.

-Boundary rule. This rule says that every opportunity is evaluated based on whether it?s within your mission.

-How-to Rule. If you can?t clearly define an action plan for the opportunity, then you know that trying to execute it will also go poorly.

According to Olsen, once an organization has subjected all the possible strategic options to the set of rules, the choices should be divided into two groups ? those that have internal implications and those that have external implications ? so you can compare similar things when making trade-offs.

Although there are never any guarantees in business, developing guidelines can help assure that organizations make the right choices. The important thing is to make a decision. ?The one concept that most business owners, executives, and managers forget is that the lack of a decision results in more derailments of the mission than any other cause.?

Olsen and her company, M3 Planning, have developed an award-winning online strategic planning system that alleviates the administrative burden of the strategy management process and includes both strategic plan development and implementation features. MyStrategicPlan is an easy-to-use software application that enables any organization, regardless of size and budget, to build a comprehensive plan, effectively and easily track goals, create professional reports for every stakeholder, and monitor implementation all year long.

Erica Olsen has developed and reviewed hundreds of strategic plans for organizations across the country through M3 Planning's online client base and on-site strategic planning facilitation work. She has also authored several strategic planning books including Strategic Planning for Dummies and was named Entrepreneur of the Year by The Business Report of Northern Nevada in 2007. M3 Planning has established itself as a source for everything related to strategic planning. In addition to their online strategic planning system, the company is also a resource for other strategic planning tools, books, articles, workshops, and facilitations.