What to include in a strategy

Writing a strategy document from start to finish can be quite a daunting task. But, without a solid strategy in place – including your objectives, plans, execution methods, and key performance indicators (KPIs) – you will struggle to create valuable and sustainable growth for your organization.

Your strategy guides you throughout periods of change. It is the blueprint for how your organization will evolve and improve on your current offering. So, when creating a comprehensive strategy, there can be a lot to consider!

Whether you’re just starting out building strategies, or simply wanting to ensure you’ve covered all your bases, here’s everything we think you need to include in a strategy – broken down into three distinct stages.

Pre-planning

Ideally, you will enter pre-planning with a high-level idea of your end goal and the steps you might take to achieve it, with more work on goals. In this stage, you will be primarily focused on gathering and collating all the information you can find to form the foundation for your strategy.

Define goals

First, you should define your ultimate goal: what do you want for your organization? Goals can be applied to different levels of the business, such as departments or disciplines, or used as milestones that contribute to a defined performance metric (for example, revenue growth). Goals will be fine-tuned later in the process, so don’t worry about being overly specific for now.

Analysis

Creating a strategy without data to work from will limit the effectiveness of your strategy. Look for relevant data within the organization, including a variety of team members’ views, that could guide your decision making. You should also conduct an external analysis, such as SWOT or PESTEL, to understand both yours and the current market position before you commit to any plans.

Need help with your analysis? Download our templates here.

Choose a structure

Your structure, or model, is how you will build your strategy and track progress. The type you choose will depend on if you are already using a specific model in your organization (such as balanced scorecard or OKRs), or other factors such as organizational size, maturity, and industry.

Learn more about strategic planning models.

Planning

Now you have a deeper understanding of what to include in your strategy, it’s time to start shaping it. All the information gathered in the pre-planning stage will help you start building and developing a strong idea of what your strategy will entail.

Refine goals

The high-level goals discussed in pre-planning should now be prioritized, refined, and formalized. This means ensuring that goals are structured, ideally following SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevance, time-bound) so you can formulate appropriate tactics and measure progress effectively. Strategic goals should also relate to your company mission, vision, and values as these guide the overall direction for your organization.

Activities and projects

You will need to decide which activities and projects will help you achieve success, as these create the link between internal capabilities, available resources, and your goals. Activities may vary in time and complexity – and may also change as you get further through the strategy process. Begin by deciding which activities have the highest priority and create a schedule that is visible to all involved stakeholders.

Roles and responsibilities

When building your project schedule, you will also need to assign roles and responsibilities to individuals. It’s critical that this is clear to all involved to reduce the risk of misalignment or miscommunication, ensuring that everyone is accountable for their contribution to the strategy. Roles and responsibilities will depend on the resources you have available, both internally and external to your organization. You might find that you have to adapt some planned activities depending on resource availability.

Execution

The execution phase is where the magic happens – when you finally get to see all your time and effort spent in planning come to fruition. When executing your strategy, it’s important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. You might find that you need to make adjustments and optimizations depending on how plans transpose to actual market conditions.

Reporting

You will need to regularly report on the status and progress of activities throughout the execution process to ensure you are both meeting deadlines and making the desired progress. Reporting should take place at set or regular intervals (for example, weekly, monthly, quarterly etc.) so that you get insight into current performance. These checkpoints will also allow you to quickly identify if there are issues with the strategy, and rectify them before they impact your plans. Implementing feedback loops into your reporting structure can help with making appropriate adjustments to your execution efforts.

Metrics for success

Defining your metrics for success will depend on what you already use to track progress within your organization, such as KPIs or OKRs. The specific metrics you choose should relate to planned projects and activities, and how they contribute to your overarching goal. Regular progress tracking of your metrics will tell you a story of your performance: what’s working well, what needs adjusting, and where (or who) needs additional focus to help you achieve success.

Next steps

The word ‘strategy’ shouldn’t instill fear when you hear it. Strategy is a way to move you from where you currently are (A) to where you’d like to be (B). It helps you build a clear, structured path for how you will achieve ambitious organizational goals.

What exactly you include in your strategy will be guided by your previous experience, but should always follow a clear framework across pre-planning, planning, and execution. Viewing the end-to-end process as three distinct stages ensures that you are methodical in building your plans, and can remove some of the initial overwhelm when creating a strategy. Mapping out the full process, from planning to execution, will support in creating a robust plan with a definitive direction, leading you to your destination.