When managing construction, you will find yourself trying to keep track of countless moving parts. The number of things you need to monitor can be overwhelming. This is where strategic planning comes in.
Strategic planning is the most critical aspect of the construction business, as it turns blueprints into buildings. Making ideas come to life requires more than just bricks and mortar. It involves creativity, speed, and accuracy, all working together.
It is an ongoing process that helps you set goals for your business and determine how to reach them. If you do it right, strategic planning will help you focus on your business’s long-term growth instead of responding to changes and problems in the market.
However, it is essential to remember that strategic planning is not a set of steps you must take at the start of a new business phase. Instead, it is a tool that helps you make decisions. In this article, let us talk about the most essential parts of a truly adaptable and responsive strategic plan and how to make one and put it into action. But first, let us define strategic planning.
What Does Strategic Planning Mean?
When making a strategic plan for a construction project, the project manager often collaborates with company planners, stakeholders, and clients to identify the exact needs that will meet each client’s expectations. This helps set goals and targets specific to the project’s needs.
Building management firms plan strategically by creating a detailed road map for a project from start to finish. This means carefully considering the resources, deadlines, rules, and unexpected problems that could arise along the way. Every step is carefully thought out, planned, and carried out, from writing the first draft to putting the last nail in place.
After this meeting, the project manager carefully creates a detailed plan for delivering the work. This master plan should have clear instructions for each step and important dates to ensure the project team sticks to the schedule and does not go over budget.
What Are The Essential Parts of A Strategic Plan
Now that we have defined strategic planning let’s discuss what a strategic plan usually includes and what you should consider when making one. It will be easier to create a plan that fits your strategy with the work that needs to be done in the real world.
Values Statement
The rules that guide how you act or make decisions at work are your values. You formalize what is essential to your company and how you want to do business in a values statement.
Values statements affect how companies work together and interact with their clients. Many business values and company cultures are the same, which internalizes values and makes them crucial to strategy planning. Make sure that your plans for the next three to five years, which is the time frame that most strategic plans usually cover, are in line with how you want your workers and customers to experience your business.
Vision Statement
Your company’s vision statement focuses on what you want to do in the future and your long-term goals. Like the ones you listed in the first part of your strategic plan, vision statements should be short, aspire to great things, and be linked to the core values of your business. Because a vision statement is meant to inspire people, it can be helpful to get people from all over your company involved in the writing process.
Mission Statement
The vision statement tells people what your group does, but the mission statement tells them why it exists and who it serves. It also briefly outlines how you plan to reach your goal.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and dangers. SWOT analysis helps you determine what inside your company could affect your strategic plan, such as its strengths and weaknesses. It also lets you see how your company fits into the bigger business picture.
Knowing the pressures from inside and outside your company before you start implementing your strategic plan will help you set yourself up for success, devise ways to beat the competition, and handle possible risks.
Outline Your Objectives
A strategic plan’s business goals section clearly and concisely spells out what your company wants to achieve. A standard method for making goals is to use the SMART principles, which say to pick goals that are clear, measurable, attainable, relevant, and have a due date, which gives you a sense of purpose.
Finalize Your Goals
It is critical to be able to identify what your end goals are for the project. For example, if one of the goals were to build long-term ties with clients to make sure they would continue to be successful, the goals could be:
- Putting together a way to get reviews and feedback
- Regularly surveying clients to find out how happy they are
- Periodically share helpful client thoughts
Setting goals helps you better understand your strategic plan and arrange or group the things you need to do as you lay them out. If you group or prioritize your goals, managing your resources, assigning jobs, and prioritizing tasks will be much easier.
Create Action Plans
Lastly, your action plans, which are also called “tactics” or “approaches,” spell out the exact steps you will take to reach your goals. These plans break down your goals into workable tasks and subtasks that you can do.
Leave some wiggle room in this part of your strategic plan for action plans. Some companies even make backup plans at this point before telling their team members about the primary plan.
If you plan for what could go wrong now, you should be able to make changes to your plan instead of starting over after the situation.
Benefits of Strategic Planning
You are more likely to see the benefits of strategic planning when work starts once you really understand its essential parts, as mentioned above. Some of these perks are:
- Having a clear goal and direction for your team
- Boosts accountability, communication, and collaboration
- Using up-to-date knowledge to make good decisions
- Taking advantage of chances and dealing with problems as they come up
- Focusing on sustainability
Still, it is essential to remember that any of these things could change during the years you’ve planned. As your work progresses, consider the goals, values, and opportunities that drive your business and the steps you will take to make them happen.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Making a Strategic Plan
In this section, let’s examine the steps to help you create a solid strategic plan that can be changed.
Write Down Your Goal and Your Vision
Start by clearly defining your construction business’s mission and vision. Your mission statement should include your company’s goal and what differentiates it from others. Your vision statement should spell out your long-term goals and dreams for your business.
Study Past Data and Project Learnings
To create a strategy, you must first have a complete picture of what is happening inside and outside your business. Along with the SWOT analysis that we discussed above, many strategy frameworks begin with an analysis of your company’s current state, including how well it did in the last fiscal year or planning cycle.
In order to make more accurate decisions, strategic planners often examine the following records at the start of the process and revisit them as time passes.
Set Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Outline your long-term goals and divide them into steps that you can take to reach them. From there, determine the best way to track and compare your growth by continuously finding ways to streamline and optimize tasks.
List Down and Delegate Tasks
Lastly, make a list of the tasks in your strategic plan. Then, decide who will be responsible for them, how you will let them know about this, and how you will make sure they have the tools they need to get started. This will make the part of the plan go much more smoothly.
Get Initial Feedback
Now that you are ready to implement the strategy, it is time to teach your team members about the plan, give them the tools they need to keep track of their work, work together, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
How you carry out your strategy will depend on the size of your company, the planning tools you use, and the structure of your teams.
Track and Monitor Progress
It is critical to evaluate the progress of your project. Consider which teams or parts of the team need assistance and how to give them the information in a way that works for them.
Be Responsive to Changes
As mentioned earlier, good strategy planning should be able to adapt to new situations. If you make a strategic plan instead of a project plan or an annual business plan, you know that you will need to make changes as you learn more and go about the project.
Here are some of the things you can keep track of:
- Data on the state of tasks can help you find or avoid delays and bottlenecks.
- How well your team can avoid burnout, change jobs, or adjust how resources are used
- Your KPIs to see how your actual performance compares to any predictions or hopes you made during the planning stages.
Generate Reports
Sharing reports with people who need to see them can motivate your team, help them change their goals, and generate ideas for improving things. The best reports will be based on real-time data, so you can be sure you are using the most up-to-date information, staying flexible, and making changes to your plan as needed.
