Written by: James Milsom, Head of Marketing
Strategic management is the key to achieving your business goals. It involves setting objectives and analyzing the environment of your sector to help implement initiatives to fulfill your business’ strategy.
Making use of strategic management tools can help you organize your processes and track performance.
You can use these tools to determine precisely where your organization is going in the next few years and beyond and how to get there.
Here, we’ll dive into the five best strategic management tools to help you develop your corporate strategy and meet your goals.
Strategic management tools can help your business determine where it’s at right now, where it’s heading, and what metrics and initiatives need to be tracked to get there. Their benefits include:
Strategic management tools play a key role in closing your strategy-to-execution gap.
We’ve covered what strategic management tools do and some of their key benefits. Next, we’ll dive into some of the most powerful strategic marketing tools you can use to improve your approach to strategic management.
SWOT analysis is an internal tool that your business can use to evaluate your internal and external strengths and weaknesses and your competitive position.
SWOT is an acronym for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.”
The first two components, strengths, and weaknesses, look at internal factors within your business, whereas the latter represent external factors that may impact your company.
Let’s look at what each component refers to and how they can be used to measure your opportunities and weaknesses:
First introduced to Intel in the 1970s by Andrew Grove, OKR stands for “objectives and key results.” They’re a way for your team to track progress and encourage engagement around setting challenging and realistic goals.
To set OKRs, you typically write an objective with three to five supporting “key results” underneath, which outline how the objective will be measured.
The objective you set is simply what you plan to achieve.
This objective should be action-oriented and inspirational, encouraging you or your employees to have something inspiring to work towards.
The key results you design should work as smaller goals you must tick off to achieve the overall objective.
Effective key results are specific, time-sensitive, and measurable, meaning there’s no gray area or room for negotiation - you either meet the requirements of the key result or you don’t.
With OKRs, you’ll usually set a period to review them every quarter to check whether the key results are met. Once completed, the objective has been achieved.
Learn more about OKRs and how you can use them alongside Hoshin Kanri in our eBook:
Another tool for strategic management is a PESTLE analysis.
It’s one of the key strategic management tools to dive into the external factors that affect your organization and its success. Here are the different elements that make up a PESTLE analysis that may affect your business:
Another powerful strategic management system that can help you achieve your business goals is known as balanced scorecard (BSC).
It encourages you to look at past performance data to help you make better, more informed decisions. Balancing strategic measures with traditional financial measures offers a more “balanced” view of your business’ performance - which is where the name comes from.
It can help you measure your business's intellectual capital, providing you with a competitive advantage.
To do this, you will gather your business data and information and look at it from four different perspectives: learning and growth, business processes, customer perspectives, and financial data.
A key benefit of the BSC is that it allows your business to gather all its information and data into one report to improve procedures and operations, saving your team time and resources.
It can also be part of a toolkit, including Hoshin Kanri.
By measuring the above metrics, you’ll gain insight into what your business is doing well and where you need to invest in your employees’ training to meet your goals.
Learn more about BSC with our guide.
The VRIO framework is a great way to analyze your business’ internal resources and find your competitive advantage.
VRIO is an acronym for value, rarity, imitability, and organization.
You can use this tool to categorize your resources (such as financial resources, human resources, material or non-material resources) depending on whether they hold certain traits outlined in the framework:
Learn more about VRIO with our guide.
Strategic management tools are a great way for your business to assess its performance and competitive advantage.
But these goals can’t be achieved without a well-executed strategy. That’s where i-nexus can help you.
Our strategy execution software can help to streamline your processes and overcome any blockers that get in your way.
Think of it as more goals achieved, with less effort on your part.
Ready to discover the better way to deliver on your plans? Book a demo today and see how the i-nexus software can help get your whole team aligned on achieving your business goals.
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James Milsom is Head of Marketing at i-nexus. James has wide-ranging experience in telecommunications, energy, education, and software markets.
As Head of Marketing, his drive is to raise awareness and understanding of the challenges facing enterprises in delivering strategic objectives and transformation amidst changing markets and the obstacles traditional tools and methods present leaders.
If you’d like to talk more about Strategy Execution, contact James at james.milsom@i-nexus.com or connect with him on LinkedIn for the latest insights.