Strategic planning is the process where an organization defines its strategy or its direction while making important decisions on allocating its resources to implement its aligned strategy. However, strategic evaluation and control is the procedure of determining the effectiveness of a plan that is set in place by the organization in attaining the organizational objectives and taking corrective measures where needed. To successfully evaluate the strategic goal you must select methods, metrics and control strategy that will be used to ensure that the strategic plan is implemented successfully.
First, is determining the goals for the business. The goals of your organizations should be selected smartly. They should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and also have a period for evaluation attached. Jot down all of the goals to be able to review them as you are evaluating your strategy process. Secondly, is to prepare an income statement for the period of evaluation. It is essential to use this method to evaluate the sales results. Start by comparing the current sales with the previous sales and determine if there is a sign of progress or not. Also, compare the expenses and ensure all cost of operation is not escalating without probable cause (Venkatraman & Ramanujam, 2015). Lastly, keep track of the results of your promotional and advertising plans. Ensure that you have the appropriate knowledge of what the company is placing your ads and searching the sources of your sales are advertising and promoting. If you have a website, it should be evaluated and regularly updated with the current state of the organization.
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Besides the methods of evaluation, there are also specific metrics that are used to evaluate the strategic goal of an organization. First, there is the employee satisfaction score. To be able to gauge the mood and reduce attrition of your employees is through the metrics arrived at from the satisfaction survey of the employees. It will help to improve performance by focusing only on the essential areas that are important to your employees. The second metric is productivity. The productivity metric is tightly tied to the business. It can be chosen based on the strategic goal for the evaluation period by deciding the productivity of the organization. It can be used when you want to launch a new product or measure sales of productivity across the organization. Lastly, there is customer satisfaction score. It is essential to measure the satisfaction of the customer for every service of the organization for the internal and external customers. This help to identify the functions that need to be attended to with immediate effect (Venkatraman & Ramanujam, 2015).
Managers should track strategy as it is being implemented by establishing strategic controls such as premise control which is modified to check whether the premises of the plan are valid since the implementation control which is carried out as new events unfold. There are different implementation control methods, first, the strategic thrust that gives information which gives a feedback whether the strategy is shaping as planned or not and the milestone review help to monitor the progress of the strategy at various intervals (Lawrie & Cobbold, 2014). Lastly, there is special alert control which is a rapid assessment of an organization due to an unforeseen event e.g acquisition of a competitor by an outsider.
- Lawrie, G. & Cobbold, I. (2014). Third-generation balanced scorecard: evolution of an effective strategic control tool. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 53(7), 611-623.
- Venkatraman, N. & Ramanujam, V. (2015). Measurement of business economic performance: An examination of method convergence. Journal of management, 13(1), 109-122.