Recently I ran across a study by Bain & Company that showed that strategic planning is one of the top five management tools. It’s popularity does not surprise me, given the results that can be achieved via strategic planning.
If you consider conducting strategic planning for your organization, you’re in good company.
According to a 2013 survey conducted by Bain & Company, strategic planning is considered a top five management tool. (The other four are customer relation management, employee engagement, benchmarking, and the balanced scorecard.)
Strategic planning also rated very high in manager satisfaction.
My work with ABA providers supports these findings. My clients find the strategic planning process and resulting plan very valuable in achieving desired business results.
A major goal of strategic planning for (ABA) businesses is to prepare for and manage growth.
Prepare for and Manage Growth
The increase in autism prevalence and the number of underserved individuals with autism and their families provide a ready market for BCBAs to start their own autism services and scale services fairly rapidly.
It is important that increasing number of clients is accompanied by scaling internal processes and systems.
Strategic planning provides the forum for the leadership (including the board, if it is a nonprofit organization) to discuss the organizational vision, identify current threats and challenges, and set clear priorities that support and sustain a growing organization.
Strategic Planning Sets the Stage for Other Organizational Interventions
Because the strategic planning process establishes the larger picture of mission and vision and creates a schedule for tackling the priorities, it is the perfect tool for guiding organizational behavior management (OBM) and other performance improvement interventions.
Having a strategic plan ensures that the important priorities get the attention they need. Many plans list these priorities in temporal and logical dependencies.
Using this top 5 management tool, strategic planning should be a go-to intervention for any business that to grow in sustainable ways and deliver superior products or services.