So you've been asked to develop your IT organization's Strategic Plan. I know what you're thinking: "No one needs a Strategic Plan." However, every organization needs a plan of action; a guide to achieve the goals of your organization. This article describes the action steps to develop a practical strategic plan. Following the path outlined below, you can transform a strategic plan into an action plan; creating a direct line-of-sight between your mission, goals, and core projects.

You can't make this journey alone. The effort must be actively and visibly sponsored by the recognized leader in the organization. Furthermore, you must create a team to work through a series of facilitated sessions. Members should represent all functional areas of the firm. If you're the lead technologist in the firm, involving a diverse team in the development of an IT strategic plan will pay significant dividends.

While the steps below are in a particular order, they can be shifted around as appropriate, ideally under the supervision of a professional consultant. For each step, facilitated team sessions are recommended to develop the key components of the plan. There are many benefits to this approach, primarily the efficiency and quality of the result attained by engaging a group in a concentrated, structured fashion.

Action 1: Check the Weather
Before setting out, check the weather along the route. To that end, the strategic planning team should define the organization's current environmental or operational context. The environment is described by major internal and external events and influences that will affect the organization during the period covered by the plan. These events include winning a big case, losing a key partner, or even larger trends like the sagging economy.

Similar to the weather, consider the risks you might face on the trip, like running out of gas on your drive across the Mojave or pirates on your sail in the Caribbean. To determine the risks ask the questions, "What events would prevent us from fulfilling our mission or achieving our goals? What will be the impact and what will we do to mitigate the impact?" The plan should include the top four to seven most probable risks and corresponding mitigation plans.

Action 2: Know the Destination
The purpose of a strategic plan is to describe the direction of an organization by creating a direct line-of-sight between the mission, goals, and projects. In the context of an IT group within a law firm, the objective of this step is to create a mission for the group that supports the firm's mission. Missions have the odd habit of confusing people. The mission should simply provide your staff and those reading the plan a strong sense of why the organization exists and the direction it's heading.

With the mission documented, you're ready to create the four to seven organizational goals the staff will pursue to achieve the mission. Goal-setting is more art than science. Just a quick note on goals here since so much information exists on this subject. Be disciplined and follow the SMART model. Make your goals Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, and Time-based.

If you have a mission for the IT group, take this opportunity to validate it to see if it's still applicable to the current environment defined in Action 1. If you're struggling to create a mission that is distinct from the firm's, don't sweat it! Just adopt the firm's mission as yours, and be sure your goals are directly linked to that mission.

Action 3: Determine the Number 1 Priority (All of Them)
The enemy of a good strategic plan is too many projects, delivering disparate results, with no difference between them. The objective of this step is to determine what projects are underway and describe how (or if) they support the goals and mission of the organization. Ask the team to list all the projects in the IT organization. Then, using simple worksheets, have the project leaders define every project, including the deliverables, resources, schedule, and, most importantly, what specific organizational goals the project supports. If the project doesn't support one or more goals, stop the project immediately.

Now prioritize the projects, keeping the prioritization process simple. You can use such highly technical categories as: "Must Do Under Any Circumstances", "Do If Resources Are Available", and "Wait Until Next Year". In the plan, these categories become "Core Strategic Projects", "Other Critical Projects", and "Pending Projects", respectively. Prioritization requires the will (and authority) to unequivocally place a project in one category. There should be only three to five projects in the "Must Do" column. The number of projects in the other categories is irrelevant as long as the leadership adheres to the principle that resources will only allow a finite number of top priorities. If something is added to the "Must Do" list, something else must come off.

Action 4: Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!
If you don't go home too tired to speak, then you haven't said enough. This philosophy is especially true of any effort that focuses an organization around a mission, goals, or projects. Communication is the single most important key to successfully developing and implementing a strategic plan. Communicating about the strategy continues throughout the project, increasing during the implementation of the plan. Promote the plan through focus groups, lunch-time discussions, promotional pieces published regularly in internal emails and newsletters, and through informal conversations between leaders in the firm and their employees.

Action 5: What a Pretty Cover!
Now that you've successfully developed a first-class strategic plan, how do you get people to look beyond the pretty cover? Once you’ve completed the initial steps, you must establish an ongoing review of the strategic plan and associated projects. The organization must be held accountable to the intended results of the plan. To that end, the following questions must be asked and answered regularly, and include appropriate accountability based on the answers:

~          Are people's actions consistent with the documented mission?

~          Has there been measurable progress toward the established goals?

~          Are the priority projects being executed as documented in the plan? Have we stopped or appropriately adjusted the non-"Must Do" projects?

~          Are the priorities we established in the plan still valid?

~          Can EVERYONE in the organization talk about key elements of the plan? For example, can individuals express the mission, describe a strategic goal, or identify a core project?

Other important considerations in producing a strategic plan include:

~          The format of the final product is not as important as the content. The guiding principle for the format should be the usefulness of the document. Can someone pick up the plan and, after reading it, gain a sense of the direction of the organization?

~          Take the time necessary to develop a quality product containing useful information. Strategic planning efforts take between six and twelve weeks depending on the complexity of the plan,  the number of projects to be defined and prioritized, and the size of the organization.

~          Be sure that you document the process while you're executing the actions above. The next time the organization calls on you (or your hapless successor), you won't have to reinvent the wheel.

You Can Be a Consultant Too
The line-of-sight between the mission, goals, and core projects created by the plan of action will guide the organization and establish measures by which the actions of individuals and teams will be evaluated. You've achieved the near impossible, creating a strategic action plan where one did not previously exist. The team was engaged, the organization is excited, and the attention of the firm's leaders is focused. Some final words of advice: keep it simple, keep it focused, and stay on the path. And remember, developing a strategic plan requires you to take action, not notes! Now the bad news . . . you'll be doing it again next year.

How to Create a "Line-of-Sight"
This is an example of the elements of a strategic plan that form the line-of-sight from the mission to core strategic projects.