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crucial to have support for your internal staff who are working on the implementation team and need clarity. COMMUNICATE PROGRESS. You should regularly communicate and celebrate the milestones of your plan, but there can be a lot of information to share. When in doubt, stick to the basics: core metrics, actions, and results. Provide enough details so that people have confidence that progress is being made, but be careful of creating too much noise, and remember that what that looks like is different for every company. In addition, if you’re not regularly communicating core business information, a strategic plan can be a good way to start, especially if you’ve aligned it with your annual business plan. HAVE FUN WHILE YOU’RE AT IT. Give your plan a theme. It might feel like business as usual for those managing the implementation behind the scenes, but overall, it is a different initiative with its own goals and milestones – so it should feel different. A theme can serve as an overarching vision for a plan and as an engaging, creative way to communicate and celebrate progress. Like any project, implementation – not just organization – can make your strategic plan a success. Set yourself up, stay focused, and communicate well, and instead of gathering dust, that shiny new plan will end up well-worn and dog-eared from constant use. Ashley Heinnickel is the chief marketing officer for LDG and has led the project management office for multiple strategic plans throughout her career. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
ASHLEY HEINNICKEL, from page 3
is to appoint a project management office, or PMO, that will oversee the execution of your strategic plan. From overseeing scope, schedule, and budget, as well as approving project leaders and teams, a PMO can help ensure successful collaboration, communication, and implementation of the plan. A PMO can have a dedicated leader responsible for capturing progress, understanding risks and issues, and acting as an accountability partner to ensure that the plan is not getting dusty. Be sure to establish mechanisms for tracking and measuring success, especially a method in your financial system or enterprise resource planning tool. This is a streamlined way to capture time and expenses in one place for ease of analytics and insights. In addition, using well- organized progress trackers can keep people focused on their goals and milestones. You can also drive accountability by having individual project leaders set annual priorities and milestones that they will report on in a consistent rhythm, such as quarterly. MANAGE PROGRESS AND ADDRESS ISSUES. Keep in mind that even though it’s often called a strategic “plan,” it might be a more fluid process than a rigid checklist – perhaps more like a strategic direction. Aspects can change and priorities can shift as the plan progresses over time, so like most situations, be prepared to pivot when challenges or barriers present themselves. Maybe the right candidate for a new position is proving elusive and that goal needs to shift to the next quarter; maybe a dramatic change in market forces or the economy will require the whole plan to be revalidated. This is where it’s
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THE ZWEIG LETTER MARCH 31, 2025, ISSUE 1579
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