Harvard Business Review: The New Game Plan for Strategic Planning

Harvard Business Review’s, “The New Game Plan for Strategic Planning,” includes interviews with industry experts, survey result analysis, illuminating charts, and real-world success stories of organizations embracing cloud-based strategic planning.

Disruptive innovation, new business models, and globalization have accelerated the rate of change for every business. To stay competitive, organizations are revising their business models, product sets, and other critical aspects of their operations on a much more frequent and continuous basis. Some can react quickly, while others struggle. But what separates the winners from the losers?

Harvard Business Review asked 385 readers from organizations with 500+ employees about the planning challenges they face and the tools they use. The results were eye-opening:

Nearly 90 percent of respondents said their organization still uses spreadsheets as a primary planning tool. Similarly, nearly 60 percent said they use homegrown systems. Yet only 22 percent are satisfied with them.

A large majority of respondents also said they need to plan more frequently than in the past—with their plans needing ongoing and frequent changes, including at the execution stage.

Looking to the future, a similarly large majority of respondents said they expect this pace to quicken further over the next 12 to 18 months.

The conclusion: “Siloed spreadsheet-based planning … can no longer support today’s scale or pace of business.”

Fortunately, there’s a better way forward.

Leading organizations are moving to a more dynamic planning approach that uses technologies and planning philosophies that allow business plans to be changed with relative ease and speed. This approach includes new tools that support easier data-sharing, improved accuracy, and greater collaboration across the organization. These improvements, in turn, can boost speed and productivity in ways that dramatically aid the bottom line.

“The New Game Plan for Strategic Planning” is the product of HBR’s in-depth research. The report includes interviews with industry experts, analysis of survey results, illuminating charts, and real-world success stories of organizations that have embraced cloud-based strategic planning.

Get your complimentary copy of “The New Game Plan for Strategic Planning” by Harvard Business Review.