Critical Success Factors for Strategic Planning and Management Strategic Planning and Management)

Organizations that are successful at strategy have mastered certain skills. All of these critical success factors relate directly to the required competencies and responsibilities of HR.

• Alignment of effort. Strategic alignment is necessary to maintain organizational focus on a defined mission and goals. As the strategy is progressively elaborated at other levels within the organization-in business divisions and/or functional areas each unit must examine its plan against the organization's. Will HR's activities help move the organization toward its goal? Are HR activities attentive to the logic behind the original plan and the value of the original goal?

• Control of drift. Strategic drift is a phenomenon in which an organization fails to recognize and respond to changes in its environment that necessitate strategic change. Like a ship bound for the rocks, the organization fails to make necessary course corrections. It beats on against the current of external forces that drive it further and further from its goals. Drift is often caused by an organizational culture that is too deeply rooted in the past, in the ways things have always been done. HR can help develop leaders with vision and courage, and HR leaders can embody these values as well.

•  Focus on core competencies. Core competencies are usually unique advantages an organization possesses, abilities that are integral to creating customer value and difficult for competitors to imitate. For example, core competencies can be technical expertise or excellence in design, marketing, or operations. A core competency can also be vision-the ability to see when and how the organization can reinvent itself. Strategic organizations know what they are good at and focus their efforts on where those competencies will have the most effect. Necessary but not core competencies can be outsourced to reliable suppliers.