Trends in Strategic Planning

 

The shutdowns and lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted business strategies and activities. Those disruptions have shaped project management trends as organizations scrambled to adapt to a changing business environment and embrace new ways of planning and management.

Strategic planning involves designing specific business strategies and implementing them. It also entails evaluating the outcomes of a company's strategic plan on overall long-term business goals, mission, or vision. If organizations are to be profitable and survive in today's cutthroat business environment, which is also increasingly complex and dynamic, they must keep tabs on trends in strategic planning.

For example, enterprises must proactively prepare and respond to future disruptions and change. To thrive in a disruptive future, organizations must continuously scan and promptly respond to business environment disruptions that might threaten or impact their place in the market space. Organizations that successfully leverage new tools and innovative strategies to reinvent work, protect their market share, and retain customers and employees.

The Great Resignation, remote and hybrid work models, inflation, supply chain issues, and many other factors today profoundly impact business decisions about tomorrow. Now more than ever, it is important to include market trends, customer insights, and best practices relevant to a company's focus area to make it future-proof. With demands for accountability on the part of businesses, opinion metrics and customer and employee feedback must be part of strategic planning.

Also, consumers increasingly expect organizations and brands to place values before profitability, transparency, fair trade, sustainability, diversity, inclusion, or another cause. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) must be integral to any strategic planning if companies are to attract and retain top talent and build an ethical, trusted brand. In the future, a successful strategy must take a broad stakeholder approach that covers customers, employees, partners, and communities interests and concerns.

Today, organizations need to include emotional intelligence in their strategic planning. Although analytical and organizational skills have always been critical for project managers, the current situation also demands they possess emotional intelligence. For example, in its Future of Jobs report, the World Economic Forum has repeatedly shown that employers seek candidates with emotional intelligence.

In addition, the growth of remote and hybrid work models has increased the demand to empathize and connect. In particular, project managers and business leaders need to understand people well if projects are to succeed in a fast-changing digital environment.

Technology is playing a bigger role in planning and operations. For instance, as more businesses transition to cloud technology, the days of manual processes and legacy systems are rapidly fading. In the future, organizations must allocate more strategic planning time to collaborate with information technology (IT) professionals as technology upgrades take root across departments.

Also, as more and more enterprises turn to software solutions to reduce costs and boost productivity, creating an integrated technology ecosystem within organizations will be paramount. In turn, the role of IT teams will become strategically critical, and they must be involved in all strategic planning exercises.

Finally, social responsibility is no longer a buzzword but a critical priority in strategic planning as movements for climate and social justice gains more urgency and global prominence. New technologies, including social media, will see pressure from citizens and lawmakers to prove that their business models promote social good.