Week 3 Blog 1 : Improving Strategic Planning for my Capstone Project

Improving Strategic Planning for my Capstone Project

As I began to read the article “How to improve strategic planning” published in McKinsey's Quarterly issue of August 2007, I could only think about how I could make the best use of the suggestions to improvise the strategic planning process to shape the strategy to achieve the goals of my MISM Capstone project successfully! If you are a senior working towards your capstone project – my blog here will definitely help you.

I believe that a formal process for strategic-planning plays a very crucial role to ensure that the strategy adopted has a fruitful impact. This differs from Henry Mintzberg’s notion who believes that the real strategy is always formed informally. Every organization existing today adopts a strategy before taking a course of action and categorizes these courses of actions under several projects. Some aspects of my project require me to analyze the competitors’ activities in the new proposed technology, use that knowledge to help design the client’s new strategy for adopting that technology and designing technology solutions to cater the ever-growing needs of the market. 

This week’s articles helped me gain the following insights for my project:

1. Identifying Issues
The first step I intend to take is to identify the issues in client’s problem statement that can serve as barriers towards delivering a solution – these could be any technological advancements, social, economic and business trends. Only once we are clear on possible issues that could arise, can we think of a solution.

2. Bringing together the right people
We as a team, have different academic backgrounds – MBAs and MISMs and felt that it was equally important for both to be a part of the strategy development process as it is important to involve people who are implementing technological solutions to have a say in how to go about it.

3. Adapt Planning Cycles to the needs of each business
In order to implement the technology solution, we decided to build along the Agile practices of the IT industry wherein we divided the product into small modules to replicate the weekly deliverables in the industry.

4. Implement a strategic performance management system
Instead of focusing on key deliverables for each iteration of our solution, we aim to measure metrics such as existing skill-set of each team member, required skill-set ideas at each stage of development, etc. in order to track the progress of the project.

I believe that a casual conversation in the hallway would not really help our team achieve goals. It is crucial for everyone to be on the same page at each stage of the project. To avoid confusions, delays, and misunderstandings, it is of utmost importance to build and form a strategy and track lack of adherence to weekly goals. At the same time, I also believe that it is vital to building healthy relationships and friendships with the peers to achieve goals. True success lies in achieving goals as a team, not individually.


References:

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-to-improve-strategic-planning

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-real-value-of-strategic-planning/