It happens. You show up for work one morning and get called into a staff meeting of the bosses. "As you know," that's how it always starts- and you never even suspected, "we are in the midst of a business transformation." Trans-for-what???

"Your boss believes so highly in you that you have been selected to write our corporate strategic plan. We need it for the next board meeting in 45 days."

That is how many of us become reknown authors within our companies- authors of business fiction. Now what?

Strategic planning is an on-going process. Like most forward-moving organizations, consider a 12-month review cycle. This includes the following steps:

Conduct Environmental Scan: Extensive data sampling effort of key environmental and operational factors with potential strategic and tactical impact. Usually concludes with Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Analysis.

Benefit: Identifies and analyzes major factors with potential tactical and/or strategic impact that emerge during the year of execution, thereby enabling corporate responsiveness and agility regarding near-term and strategic factors

Develop Planning Guidance: Provide direction and planning constraints to leadership in preparation for the Strategic Plan and Management Plan development phases

Benefit: Provides framework for and contextualizes strategic planning efforts by introducing the constraints and priorities for the process

Conduct Strategic Planning: Deliberative process focused on defining/refining your company's strategic direction to provide organization and programmatic focus for both long- and short- term organizational activities.

Benefit: Provides the mechanism to craft a long-term direction that takes into consideration internal and external priorities, as well as begins developing a means of working towards the established direction.

Develop Management Action Plans: Detailed, actionable framework for implementing strategic goals and objectives.

Benefit: Provides the actionable mechanism for implementing the Strategic Plan and ensuring the alignment of organizational mission priorities, initiatives and resources with that strategy.

Execute & Review Performance: Implement specific Management Action Plans to include monitoring, measuring, and managing of performance against plan throughout the year.

Benefit: Ensures accountability for implementation of corporate strategy and enables senior leaders to achieve desired mission results by monitoring and reviewing organization performance.