research paper about strategic planning

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• Published: 03 December 2019

Co-designed strategic planning and agile project management in academia: case study of an action research group

• Enric Senabre Hidalgo 1 &
• Mayo Fuster Morell 2  

Palgrave Communications volume  5 , Article number:  151 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Strategic planning, a standard activity for project management in different areas and types of organisations, can contribute to improving the dynamics of collaboration in academia, and specifically in research processes. This paper joins the still scarce studies on strategic planning within research groups, contributing to the field of both team science and organisational management from a social sciences perspective and “strategy-as-practice” paradigm. Through the case study of an action research group, after the experimental co-creation of its long-term strategy involving different participatory design methodologies, we quantitatively analyze how this process influenced communication and group relations, both internally and in relation to its participation in the ecosystem with other stakeholders. Thus, as a result of a detailed content analysis in the different communication channels and tools of the group, we address its impact on the team’s agile project management (APM), adopted in a novel way by its members. Data compared between periods, once the strategic plan was co-created, suggest that this type of approach to co-created strategic thinking can improve coordination, cohesion and joint vision among participants. In agreement with emerging academic literature in this field, pertaining to the need to understand strategic planning as a process of socialization and dialogue, other relevant results of the study point to the particular suitability of this type of planning in research environments interested not only in its academic, but also social and ecosystemic impact. The results obtained and discussed also provide elements of assessment when considering the applicability of this type of strategic co-creation process in other areas of knowledge and disciplines.

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Introduction

Despite the current competition among academic institutions for resources and prestige in the adoption of evaluation systems, ranking mechanisms and performance indicators (Ordorika and Lloyd, 2015 ), regarding current challenges in the organisational dynamics of academic systems there’s little evidence of successful strategies and practices for research project management (Derrick and Nickson, 2014 ). This is especially the case when it comes to the additional need to adapt the production of scientific knowledge to collaborative and interdisciplinary teamwork (Wuchty et al., 2007 ), connecting networked academic organisations and researchers (Wang and Hicks, 2015 ), in a new context that Jasanoff ( 2003 ) defined as the “participatory turn of science”. From the fields of social studies of science and science of team science, authors like Jeffrey ( 2003 ) or Bozeman and Boardman ( 2014 ), describe how collaboration across teams and disciplines also requires progressive adaptation of a shared language and different types of tools. For these reasons, strategic planning seems to be one of the elements that could possibly contribute to better management practices in academia (Wilbon, 2012 ), which is usually a complex and ever-changing process (Eccles et al., 2009 ). On the other hand, when considering alternative modes of knowledge production in academia, as well as the paradigmatic transition of universities in the global context (Santos, 2012 ), strategic thinking usually emerges in research groups oriented to achieve impact beyond the academic domain, like in the cases of action research (Fuster Morell, 2009 ) or mission-driven research (Holm et al., 2013 ). This article provides an analysis of how far co-creation could have a role in the application of strategic planning in academic contexts, in this case through an action research group, and its impact at the levels of management and interrelationships.

Strategic planning in the field of project management

With its foundations in the principles of action research and organisational development (Argyris and Schön, 1997 ), project management is generally considered as the practice of planning and executing the work of a team, based on specific control models and theories, to achieve specific goals and success criteria (Kerzner and Kerzner, 2017 ). From a social science perspective, however, project management has also been studied and applied in understanding projects as social processes, focusing on human behavior and actions within groups and organisations (Blomquist et al., 2010 ). Strategic planning, on the other hand, as applied in project management, can be defined as “deliberative, disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organisation (or other entity) is, what it does, and why” (Bryson, 2011 , pp. 4–5). Strategic planning, in this sense, is one of the most widely used strategy tools in business, but is also used in public and non-profit organisations (Ferlie and Ongaro, 2015 ).

Besides the fact that empirical evidence of a positive relationship between strategic planning and organisational performance remains inconclusive (Wolf and Floyd, 2017 ), after Mintzberg’s ( 1994 ) critique of the fallacies of rational and centralized strategic planning as a top-down process, from the field of organisational studies it has also been analysed as a key mechanism for team integration and coordination, and as a basis for both centralizing and decentralizing organisational decision making (Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011 ). In this regard, influenced by the mentioned social science perspectives, in recent years there has been a shift in the field of project management research on strategic planning (Wolf and Floyd, 2017 ), pointing to its benefits from the perspective of participative and socialized process models (Andersen, 2004 ). From this second perspective, strategic planning can be studied more as a “process” than a “product”, and strategy development, therefore, as an evolutionary and integrative activity (Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2009 ), within a strategy-as-practice paradigm (Whittington, 1996 ). However, even considering how strategic planning has evolved towards these more integrated and process-oriented approaches, there has been little focus in management literature on addressing to what extent and, specifically, how it could be co-created using participatory methodologies.

State of the art on strategic planning applied to research

Again, with regard to the current challenges of academic systems and research activity from an organisational perspective, although there is scarce academic literature about strategic planning for research organisations, studies in this area show how it has gained some popularity in the general operation of universities (Srinivasa et al., 2015 ; Dooris et al., 2004 ), and also with open and participative approaches (Amrollahi and Rowlands, 2017 ). More specific studies about the application of strategic thinking in research examine its implementation in R&D processes in firms (Bemelmans, 1979 ), in industry-academic collaboration (Burke et al., 1985 ), in research teams in the health sector (Leischow et al., 2008 ), in global initiatives of medical research (Berkley et al., 2010 ), in strategic collaboration within scientific centers (Boardman and Gray, 2010 ), or for the administrative management of research (Drummond, 2003 ).

In this respect, focusing on scholarly activity and academic organisations, relevant case studies on achieving collaborative and participative consensus for strategically planned research agendas address how to combine online tools and offline sessions during the process (Wilbon, 2012 ), or how to engage iteratively different academic communities of practice around research strategic planning (Best et al., 2015 ). Sá and Tamtik ( 2012 ), on the other hand, highlight the diversity of the approaches and perceptions of academics about the research mission, usually constrained by broader social and organisational structures of universities, and by the complex nature of the research enterprise itself. In all cases, however, there is still scarce literature on how to collaboratively develop strategic plans in academic research organisations, and its effect on group dynamics.

The co-creation approach: participatory design and agile project management

Co-creation (or co-production), which refers to processes of collective creativity, is a very broad term, with its applications ranging from the added value of customer participation in the definition of a product or service (Ranjan and Read, 2016 ), to public participation, collaborative governance or community involvement in civic-oriented projects (Voorberg et al., 2015 ). Within this broad concept, participatory design (or co-design) refers to a specific instance of co-creation that occurs when designers and people not trained in design work together in a design development process, with participants as “domain experts” of their own needs and experience (Visser et al., 2005 ). Some key principles of co-design, in this sense, connect with the perspective of iterative and participative strategic planning, as defined above, especially when it comes to the involvement of diverse stakeholders (Flood and Jackson, 1991 ). This points to the opportunity for adopting visualization techniques derived from co-design (Sanders and Stappers, 2008 ) in order to integrate different perspectives, mutual understanding, inspiration and engagement between participants in the research strategic thinking process (Eppler and Platts, 2009 ), thereby enhancing visual and textual representations of contexts and strategies (Giraudeau, 2008 ).

On the other hand, some approaches analyse strategic planning from the perspective of how it can be improved by adapting agile project management (APM) (Cervone, 2014 ; Rand and Eckfeldt, 2004 ). APM, which can also be considered as a co-creation practice (Spinuzzi, 2015 ), consists of a set of methods and principles originally conceived for flexible and participative software development, but currently adopted in many other different domains (Ciric et al., 2018 ). This wider adoption of APM is due to its attributes of adaptive teamwork, transparency, continuous improvement and small and frequent releases for early delivery (Cao et al., 2009 ). APM, more so than other project management frameworks, emphasizes teamwork by focusing on the social aspects of project development, channelling co-creation between participants in self-organized, cross-functional teams (Hoda et al., 2013 ), with collective ownership and collective responsibility as key attributes (Robinson and Sharp, 2003 ). Among the different practices within APM, some typical ones are the regularity of short feedback meetings (“standups”) and the use of kanban boards for visualizing the workflow and team tasks from conception to completion (Polk, 2011 ).

Research questions

The arguments exposed above justify the interest in an analysis connecting such diverse bodies of literature, in order to fill the gap and contribute to the questions about how strategic planning could be based on co-creation methodologies. And also, from a meta-research perspective (Ioannidis et al., 2015 ), how such an approach could be applied to research processes. More concretely, to what extent participatory design could be used for articulating the research planning phase, and afterwards integrated with the APM for the research development phase. This leads to the following two research questions, which form the basis of this study:

How can co-creation methods be used to lead the strategic planning process of a research group?

What would be the impact of co-created strategic planning on the agile project management of research?

Answering these two questions requires, in the first case, to describe in some detail how participatory design can be combined with strategic planning principles, explaining the integration of both approaches. In relation to the second question, a quantitative approach is needed considering the general lack of empirical evidence, especially in the fields of social studies of science and team science, on how strategic planning can impact research management. In this regard, our analysis of the co-creation approach to research strategic planning is applied to the participants, sequence and methods used in the entire process.

Methodology

In order to address the two research questions, a distinctive methodological design has been applied to each one of them. Articulated around a specific case study on the Dimmons research group, this methodological approach is twofold. The first part is based on participatory design, utilised to conceptualize and prototype the Dimmons strategic planning according to co-creation principles. The second part analyses the impact of co-created strategic planning on the group’s day-to-day APM, through content analysis of the online tools used for coordinating teamwork. On this basis, the results allow us to discuss which insights of the study could be generalized to current challenges in research project management.

Background of the Dimmons case study

Created in 2016, Dimmons ( http://dimmons.net/ ) is one of the eleven research groups of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), the research center of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) based in Barcelona. Following the development of strategic planning of the IN3 Footnote 1 , which took place after the main strategic planning exercise of the UOC Footnote 2 in 2016, the Dimmons group developed its own strategic planning with the aim of establishing its strategic objectives for the period 2018 to 2023. On the one hand, the selection of the Dimmons research group as a case study is due to how it is immersed in a strategic planning context that crosses several levels of the academic institution to which it belongs, reflecting an increasingly recurring but still little studied trend. On the other hand, Dimmons also represents a paradigmatic example due to its diversity, since it is composed of members with a consolidated scientific career, but also of PhD students, external collaborators and management-oriented profiles. Since the beginning of its activity, in that sense, Dimmons operates in a framework of competitive evolution between universities and research centers, and at the same time in new collaboration dynamics to achieve not only academic impact but also social impact, as we will see. In that sense, therefore, the case study reflects a way of addressing a series of current challenges and complexities that research groups experience between long-term strategic vision and day-to-day project management.

The Dimmons research group is focused on transdisciplinarity and action research for the study of socioeconomic innovation and the collaborative economy, from the perspectives of economic and public policy analysis. The group’s composition since its beginning has evolved into a networked structure (Spinuzzi, 2015 ) which consists of different “layers” of participation (all of them involved with its strategic planning, as we will see in the results section). The action-oriented character of the research group, and its specialization in collaboration dynamics, makes it a case study particularly adapted to develop a novel approach, concretely in terms of opening up its strategic planning process by applying co-creation methods. This was seen early on as an opportunity to engage with its core team members and network of close collaborators, as well as with other representative stakeholders from the Dimmons community and ecosystem. In sum, the coincidence that the research group had to develop its own strategic planning, has an experimental and action-oriented approach, which added to its expertise on collaborative dynamics, made the Dimmons group a good case for the study. Regarding the first research question on how co-creation methods could be adapted for strategic planning, Dimmons was a good choice due to the group’s regular adoption of participatory design techniques. On the other hand, Dimmons’ novel adoption of APM (Senabre Hidalgo, 2018a ) also favours addressing the second question, regarding the impact of the co-created strategic planning on the group’s day-to-day management.

As a general result of the co-creation of the strategic plan, in which more than 40 people participated, there were a total of 38 actions defined in accordance with 6 strategic goals for the period 2018–2023, each one with an average of three key performance indicators (KPI) associated (97 in total). Its final version was published online on the Dimmons research group webpage. Footnote 3 After one year of implementation, by the end of 2018, 24 of the 97 KPIs were accomplished satisfactorily. This result represents an accomplishment of 24%, and considering that a 5-year period is envisaged for full implementation of the plan, suggests satisfactory performance in terms of achieving the co-defined goals during the first year.

Participatory design for how to apply co-creation in strategic planning

Regarding the first research question (“How can co-creation methods to be used in leading strategic planning process of a research group?”) the methodological approach was qualitative, based on participatory design. Departing from the key consideration that participatory design is indeed a methodology of action research (Spinuzzi, 2005 ), and benefiting from co-creation derived from design thinking methodologies (Kimbell, 2012 ), which have proven to improve participant engagement in research (Senabre Hidalgo et al., 2018 ), we established different visual and discussion techniques at each stage of the process for the effective participation in a transdisciplinary context. The participatory design was developed and data collected from the fall of 2016 through 2018. The methodology applied is consistent with the participatory design notions of user-centered co-creation, in detailed stages and techniques such as those described by Naranjo-Bock (2012) for (1) self-reflection of research methods (focusing on research goals and questions, who the participants are and what tools they can use, the stage of the project, etc.); (2) running co-design activities onsite, with techniques and “placements” like context mapping, storyboards, inspiration cards, diagrams or paper prototyping; (3) pilot testing and results, where the data obtained is generally visual and tangible, accompanied by the important debrief of the results of each participatory design session or process.

Following that approach, and adopting the framework of Spinuzzi ( 2005 ), through different qualitative techniques the co-creation process was structured around the three key phases of: (1) Initial exploration of work, where participants meet each other and commonalities are identified, as well as for preliminary discussions; (2) Discovery processes, when design facilitators employ various techniques to understand and prioritize work organisation, clarifying the participant’s goals and values; and (3) Prototyping, a final stage for iteratively shaping outputs and assessing results. The data came from a range of sources, including offline co-creation sessions and team meetings, meetings and interviews with some researchers and collaborators, as well as documentation resulting from the different phases and sessions of the strategic planning. Outputs of each participatory design stage were recorded in detail as they took place, through documents shared online.

Content analysis for the impact of a co-created strategic planning on APM of research

Regarding the second question (“What would be the impact of co-created strategic planning on the agile project management of research?”), the approach was based on quantitative data collection and text analysis, in order to address how far the co-creation methodologies had an impact on the group’s project management, focusing on the researchers’ discussions and behavior through digital channels. The analysis was based on extensive content analysis of two of the main online coordination tools for the AMP of the group: a chat group for daily communication and an online kanban board platform for task management.

Telegram chat content analysis

The “Dimmons al dia” Telegram chat group was adopted from February 2016 until the end of 2018 as a first approach to daily standup meetings, inspired by the Scrum method derived from APM for software development (Cervone, 2011 ). Scrum, which is one of the most adopted agile frameworks for managing knowledge work, facilitates the coordinated activity of participants who break their work into small tasks that can be completed within fixed duration cycles or “sprints”, tracking progress and re-planning in regular meetings in order to develop projects incrementally (Senabre Hidalgo, 2019 ). Via Telegram, on a daily basis from Monday to Friday each Dimmons team member (a total of 15 users, through different periods over time), via a short message during the morning period, informed others about the planned tasks for the day (Fig. 1 ), among other coordination discussions that took place regularly on that chat tool between team members.

Screenshot of the Telegram chat group for daily updates about tasks.

A combination of computer-assisted massive text analysis and comparative visualizations Footnote 4 for these chat discussions on the Dimmons Telegram group was used, after dumping and extracting to plain text the full history of the “Dimmons al dia” chat group since its creation (a text corpus mainly in Catalan, which is the normal language of team members). The data gathered consisted of the complete history of messages from 2 September 2016 to 27 December 2018 (28 months of activity). This represented a corpus of 6520 messages, with a size of 794,464 characters in 6941 lines of text.

Afterwards, in order to compare the different flows of communication in relation to the co-designed strategic plan of the research group, it was decided that the date on which the first strategic planning team workshop took place (20 December 2017) would be used as the key date for dividing the chat history in two plain text documents: “Xat Telegram Dimmons al dia 2017” (pre-strategic plan period, until 20 December 2017, with 78,644 total words) and “Xat Telegram Dimmons al dia 2018” (post-strategic plan period, after 20 December 2017, with 83,200 total words).

As a first step in the analysis, prior to coding, the plain text obtained from each document was processed as a tabular view of terms frequently used in the entire corpus. That is, a list of the most used terms for the period 2017 and a list of the most used terms for the period 2018. This facilitated an initial overview of recurrent terms, which could then be filtered and coded, identifying multiple stop words to exclude (non-relevant meaning, numbers, ambiguous terms, etc.) and on the other hand selecting specific words related to categories to include in the analysis. The coding of data obtained in this way consisted of the clustering of words relevant to the following two categories:

Coordination-related terms : data about terms related to time periods or days (today, tomorrow, now, etc.), general work-related keywords (meeting, call, document, task, pending, etc.), as well as specific verbs (preparing, sending, finishing, etc.).

Strategy-related terms : data about terms related to the six main goals of the Dimmons strategic plan (as described in the results section), for (1) academic impact (paper, data, review, survey, specific projects, etc.); (2) open tools (platform or toolkit-related); (3) ecosystem (specific partners mentioned, dissemination or projects); (4) team care and empowerment (words related to good climate among members, greetings, gender topics, etc.); (5) sustainability (new proposals, specific projects for new funding); and (6) university shift (references to the university or research center).

Kanban board content analysis

In January 2017 (when the strategic planning was co-designed) the Dimmons team adopted an open source project management software ( https://kanboard.org/ ) for additional APM practice, such as the use of an online kanban board for visualizing the flow of tasks accomplished by core team members (Fig. 2 ).

Kanban board reflecting the workflow of tasks of team members, related to strategic goals and specific projects.

For this, in connection with the six strategic goals defined in the co-design phase, each planned task could be properly tagged (selecting “academic impact”, “open tools”, etc.) according to the researchers criteria. In addition, tasks could be classified by selecting from a dropdown menu the corresponding project or category (specific projects, management tasks, dissemination, publications, events or initiatives related to networking, etc.). An analysis of this workflow-related data on the Dimmons online kanban board during the mentioned period (with different levels of participation among the nine core team members, depending on their familiarity with digital tools and perception of utility) allows for an understanding of the evolution of planned and achieved tasks in relation to the Dimmons strategic plan, as well as among team members.

Data obtained from the Kanboard log comprised details about a total of 166 user-defined tasks, in relation to tags selected (for the six strategic goals), category of project selected (among the 11 existing projects and initiatives during 2018), user activity, level of accomplishment, due dates and task description, among others. In this case, the coding related to the strategic goals was self-generated by each user at the moment of naming and defining the task, by selecting the most appropriate tag in relation to the strategic goals.

This results section is divided into two parts, which address the research questions with the methodologies described above. First, we outline how the co-design process of the Dimmons research group planning unfolded, describing the methods used, as well as its internal and management implications, based on the participatory design process itself. Secondly, we summarise the main results of the impact of the process on the group’s project management and regular communication in relation to its experimental co-creation approach, derived from the content analysis of the main coordination channels used during the regular activity of Dimmons.

How can co-creation techniques and principles be used in leading the strategic planning process of a research group? Insights from the participatory design of the Dimmons strategic planning

In relation to the first research question, about how can the strategic planning process of a research group can adopt co-creation methods, the participatory design practices and principles adopted resulted in an iterative, dialogic and eminently visual approach to strategic planning. Questions related to participants (“who”), sequence (“when”) and methods (“how”) were of critical importance since the beginning of the process (Table 1 ).

“Who”: Participation as ecosystem

In contrast to the traditional strategic planning process, developed by the group’s core team only (i.e., those with strong ties to it), Dimmons adopted a broader perspective in which the basic principle for co-creation that emerged was the concept of “participation as ecosystem” (Fuster Morell, 2010a ). That is, the Dimmons research group could be considered a research ecosystem with diverse forms and degrees of involvement, following the structure of a “power law dynamic” (or “1/9/90”) in online collaborative production (Fuster Morell, 2010b ). This reflects the composition of the participation that took place when articulating the strategic planning process, according to the three layers of the Dimmons research ecosystem:

Core Team: Director, postdocs and PhDs with grants, and research assistants (9 people).

Dimmons “Community”: University professors, former visitors, external researchers, experts and practitioners on Dimmons areas (12 people).

Dimmons “Ecosystem”: Representatives of a network of institutions with further collaborative relations, target impact or audience (10 participants from a total of 32 private and public organisations).

In relation to this, a first observation regarding how to apply co-creation in strategic planning has to do with the suitability of adopting a broad, open and participative approach, as well as decentralised approaches for higher engagement and performance in dynamic environments (Andersen, 2004 ). For this reason, who to involve in the process became a critical aspect, considering that ecosystemic participation is also meant to engage the research group community and stakeholders in the process (not only highly involved team members). In this case, the open invitation to all members of each layer of the ecosystem, as defined above, resulted in the “power law” distribution, of which only a small representation were engaged in the process but with a high level of involvement through the different co-creation sessions. Defined as a modular sequence, with the possibility of joining the process at different times, also allowed for a wider participation than if following a rigid and traditional strategic planning approach.

“When”: Iterative sequences of convergence and divergence

The iterative unfolding of the co-creation process was another main characteristic. That is, rather than a predefined sequence of steps, the guiding principles were based on the participatory design notions of “convergence” and “divergence” (Sanders et al., 2010 ). This allowed for several divergence instances (during which a considerable number of possibilities regarding goals, ideas, SWOT factors Footnote 5 , etc. were generated by participants), followed by intense convergence stages of synthesis (where the main options were presented, discussed and finally selected via different mechanisms).

Departing from that key consideration in co-creation, and its adaptation of a sequence guided by participatory design methods (Spinuzzi, 2005 ; Sanders and Stappers, 2008 ), the overall approach of the participatory design integrated key notions in literature for effective strategic planning (Wilson, 1994 ). In this respect, the organic and iterative development of the process as a co-creation sequence was consistent with the four stages of a strategic plan, as defined by Eppler and Platts ( 2009 ): analysis, development, planning and implementation (Fig. 3 ).

Stages followed in the co-creation of the strategic plan of the research group, connecting co-creation approaches (Spinuzzi, 2005 ; Sanders et al., 2010 ; Spinuzzi, 2015 ) with visual strategic planning (Eppler et al., 2006 ; Eppler and Platts, 2009 ).

As reflected above, a key consideration derived from the case study in relation to its temporal sequence is that it was possible to establish a clear coherence between the literature of co-creation and participatory design (Spinuzzi, 2005 ; Sanders et al., 2010 ; Spinuzzi, 2015 ) and of visualization techniques for strategic planning (Eppler and Platts, 2009 ; Eppler et al., 2006 ).

“How”: Integrating°co-creation methods in strategic planning

The co-creation process unfolded by connecting the different participatory design stages to specific phases of strategic planning, via a combination of five sessions in total and the adoption of nine co-creation methods (in offline but also online formats), and with the regular participation of diverse participants from the Dimmons research ecosystem (Table 2 ).

In this way, the first co-creation workshop (Fig. 4 ) focused on mapping personal attitudes and strengths, experience in methods and research approaches, which contributed to visualizing methodological affinities within the group.

Different moments and materials used for the workshop sessions with the research team.

Following the mentioned co-creation principles of “convergence” and “divergence” (Sanders et al., 2010 ), the second co-creation workshop departed from the first survey results to engage in a broader discussion about the mission and guiding principles of the group, which were discussed and re-edited offline during the debate. That second session also adopted a card-sorting technique for clustering the survey results of the SWOT. During the second co-creation workshop, a first version of the map of the Dimmons ecosystem was also drafted and discussed. An important part of this participative analysis stage of the planning was the collective identification of the “ecosystem” or external environment in which the group operates. For this, a key activity was the collective mapping of the different institutions and agents with which Dimmons collaborates or has a relevant relationship, bringing the concept of ecosystemic research closer to the perspective of the Quadruple Helix for innovation systems (Carayannis and Campbell, 2012 ). In contributing to the generation of an internal environment of transparency and openness, it is important to consider that all the dynamics took place in a context of action research where the majority of participants were familiar beforehand with similar methodologies and processes to integrate diversity and explicit points of view. Also noteworthy is the general absence of conflict situations during the whole process, and that initial discussions about methodologies and specific theoretical perspectives were activated early on. This was probably due to the fact that it was based on a small core of participants who were already cohesive around the Dimmons team, joined by other actors with diverse theoretical backgrounds and experience, and for that reason each session was oriented towards the search for synergies and learnings, making explicit the knowledge, expectations and opinions of the majority of the group. However, it should also be pointed out that sometimes during the discussion, the opinion of those with a consolidated academic profile tended to weigh more and took more preeminence, in contrast to predoctoral researchers or participants with a profile not linked to academic research.

As another important element of the group’s strategic thinking in this case, the final stages of the process not only had as benchmark reference the IN3 research center’s strategic goals, but also the potential connection with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principles. The SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals set by the United Nations for addressing urgent issues like poverty, education, gender equality, energy, environment or social justice, among others (Griggs et al., 2013 ). RRI is a multidisciplinary approach promoting the involvement of stakeholders and civil society in scientific activities for developing more inclusive innovation processes (Owen et al., 2012 ). This element of strategic planning around external indicators represented for all participants a first approach to new principles and a series of values, leveraging perspectives and discussions around the key aspect of social impact of research beyond the academic context.

As a final result, among the different key elements that are usually integrated into a strategic plan (Eppler and Platts, 2009 ), the definition of six strategic goals were incorporated into the first draft of the document (considered as a “prototype”) of six strategic goals: (1) Academic impact (“generate a high-quality research corpus of theoretical framework on socio-economic innovation”); (2) Open tools (“contribute to processes in action for the resolution of social challenges by developing research-based resources”); (3) Ecosystem building (“consolidate a ‘glocal’ network of partner organisations for quadruple helix collaboration to favour social impact and resilience”); (4) Empowered team (“consolidate the team with complementary backgrounds, healthy environment and gender-balanced talent”); (5) Catalytic sustainability (“obtain funding for action research from competitive calls with high impact and visibility”); and (6) University shift (“engage with open access, “commonification” processes, transdisciplinarity, agile principles and other changing paradigms in the academic culture”).

What would be the influence of co-created strategic planning on the agile project management of research? Insights from the analysis of impact in Dimmons coordination

Once the strategic plan was finished and shared online as a definitive version, it was incorporated into the day-to-day activities of the research group, both explicitly (by incorporating the strategic goals as categories in the group’s agile kanban board for task management) and implicitly (by guiding topics of conversation, and being in the background when regularly communicating online and offline). In order to analyse it and answer the second research question of this study, on what would be the influence of a co-created strategic planning on the APM of research, a series of content analysis on the main coordination digital channels provides different elements for discussion, especially from an action research perspective.

Dimmons Telegram chat content analysis

The evolution of user’s daily participation on the Telegram chat during 2017 and 2018 suggests that once the strategic planning was co-designed and adopted (at the end of 2017), the communication dynamics evolved from being relatively asymmetric (with just a few very active users) to a much more balanced distribution where all members contributed, following the “standup” meetings and derived conversations (Fig. 5 ).

Evolution of user participation in “Dimmons al dia” Telegram group chat during 2017 and 2018.

More specifically, from a medium used by nine participants over a timeframe of approximately two years, the co-design and implementation of the Dimmons strategic plan between December 2017 and January 2018 seems to set a landmark between a relatively unequal distribution of messages among team members (where only a few of them contributed, at very different levels) to a regular pace and volume of interventions by the majority of participants. This probably derived from applying the strategic planning as a co-creation sequence, thereby as an integrative and socialization process. In this sense, it should be noted that among the observations about the daily communication of the group through the Telegram channel, most messages and discussions focused on the planning and execution of tasks, both academic (writing articles, organisation of workshops, data collection, etc.) as administrative (agenda management, budgeting, event logistics, etc.). In contrast, during the day-to-day of the group and outside of the co-creation process itself, theoretical or conceptual discussions normally took place in other spaces and moments, normally during the development of face-to-face meetings between two or more members of the group (before and after the strategic planning process).

On the other hand, if we look at data from the content analysis of the daily update “standup” messages in 2017 (again, prior to the strategic plan) compared to the corpus of terms used in 2018 (once the strategic planning was in place) patterns also demonstrate a coincidence with a significative increase of terms related to the different strategic goals, and therefore a probable influence of the strategic planning on the daily communication of the group (Fig. 6 ).

Comparison of mentions to Dimmons strategic plan related terms in Telegram between 2017–2018.

This reflects a relative imbalance in how the different goals were addressed during both periods. While, according to these results, the attention to the group’s ecosystem and to academic impact where at the center of activity, there was much less activity, in terms of percentage, related to others such as the generation of open tools or team care. This imbalance simply demonstrates that after year one, of the five goals covered by the strategic plan, the group gave priority to tasks and processes related to its ecosystem (specific partners, collaborators or events), as well as pertaining to academic impact (publications, data, surveys, specific projects under development). What seems significant from this data, apart from how it can serve as a parallel indicator to the group’s agreed KPIs, is the increment and diversity of terms related to the strategic plan in the regular conversations and update messages on the Telegram chat for the 2018 period (and to what extent they were more relevant than in the previous year, before the co-design of the strategic plan took place).

In relation to the adoption of APM methods (in this case, establishing additional regular weekly meetings and the use of a digital kanban board, beyond the daily updates via Telegram), the increment there between 2017 and 2018 in vocabulary related to coordination tasks, timing and other key terms is also significative. Specially the preeminence of messages containing words like “today”, “pending”, “version”, “tasks” or “meeting”, which doubled in general compared to 2017.

Again, patterns show a wider use of vocabulary in coordination-related communications, with reference to tasks informed on a daily basis, once the co-creation process around the strategic planning of the research group took place. This suggests not only that team communication incorporated more perspectives related to the Dimmons strategic goals, as observed above, but also more references to general coordination and therefore the operative awareness of the group.

Finally, if we focus on 2018 (the period of the co-designed strategic plan), another relevant analysis of the content data gathered via the daily updates and conversations on the Telegram group chat, is the extent to which it reflects a very similar proportion of conversations about specific areas of the strategic goals (Fig. 7 ) for the tasks defined on the kanban board. In both cases, the majority of references during 2018, coincidentally, focus on academic impact and ecosystem building, followed by a corpus of team-related and university shift terms.

Percentage of terms related to Dimmons strategic goals on Telegram chat during 2018.

Dimmons kanban board content analysis

“As mentioned above, the results of the tags used most on the kanban board related to the strategic goals, when informing the regular tasks of team members, point to a very similar distribution as in the previous analysis of the Dimmons main Telegram chat, where academic impact and ecosystem creation are the most selected ones, followed by a smaller proportion of the other four categories”.

This suggests that both patterns coincide as an indicator of the most influencing priorities for the team derived from the strategic plan, but more importantly points to a coherence on a shared vision as an action research group derived from the co-design process. Also, this result when comparing content on the coordination channels, suggests a consistent integration of the strategic goals with the APM methods, ensuring an interconnection between the strategic plan goals and the daily activities.

Another result from the task-related data gathered via the kanban board is to what extent there’s a good balance of members contributions to the projects and initiatives connected to the strategic goals. Instead of a specialization pattern or “monolithic” distribution of projects to researchers, despite the different levels of participation informing planned tasks between users, results show a relevant quality of teamwork in terms of shared projects and cross-functionality.

In addition, the extent to which specific projects not only comprehended tasks related to different researchers but also to the various strategic goals, suggests a coherent and transversal categorization when researchers classified their regular activity in relation to the strategic plan. Data obtained from activity on the kanban board, when compared with activity on the Telegram chat informing about planned tasks for each day, also shows a clear correlation between the content generated in both channels and terms related to the different strategic goals. As already indicated, however, not all the core team members used the kanban board with the same level of regularity (as opposed to the Telegram daily updates, where participation followed the same volume and pace for all team members), with the main reason probably related to the difference in the levels of familiarity with digital tools for management.

With this study a prototype and analysis of a co-creation methodology for the strategic planning process of an action research group was developed. Regarding participation, guided by a ‘strategy-as-practice’ approach in project management and the concept of ecosystemic research, the case study integrated the diversity of perspectives and voices of more than 20 participants in total. This way of proceeding generated a key mechanism for team integration and coordination within the group, and also with its external layers of collaborators and stakeholders, which were also represented through the process. As data indicate, this required a combined approach of co-creation methods and iterations, which followed principles of participatory design and online participation. As a consequence, besides a fully defined document for the strategic roadmap of the group activity, the different actions co-defined by the core team and its ecosystem of collaborators achieved a satisfactory level of accomplishment after the first year of implementation.

In relation to the first research question, on how co-creation methods can lead the strategic planning of a research group, our study points to the possibility of developing strategic planning processes with such methods. In this respect, our contribution reflects the key methodological aspect of integrating participatory design techniques for structuring the process. This aligns with theories connecting principles of action research in social sciences, and especially co-design in the context of organisational learning, in terms of tacit and explicit knowledge transfer processes, as well as constructivist approaches to addressing complexity and uncertainty in teamwork (Argyris and Schön, 1989 ). The analysed case study of Dimmons, in this sense, seems coherent with a wider consideration of design thinking as a practical approach for enabling transdisciplinary collaboration and as a process for “shaping processes” (Lindberg et al., 2010 ). In our opinion, as addressed in this case, this connects to the need to adapt strategic planning to co-creation practices as a decentralized, integrative and iterative dialogue (Wolf and Floyd, 2017 ). Our analysis also suggests the opportunity for the utilization of academic strategic planning as a means of integrating the values of the social impact of research, such as those derived ones from SGD and RRI, which can be adopted as a landmark when addressing academic and scientific activity from a collaborative and ecosystemic perspective. Observations and outputs from this process reflect that it allowed for deeper insight into discussions and comparisons about research methods, in many cases for the first time among team members. By “voting” for preferences and visualizing expertise in such explicit ways, and selecting a wide range of possible methods, the iteration and parallel discussion allowed for the identification (later on the strategic planning process) of several areas of improvement and implications for the group composition in the mid and long term. All the data generated and shared as open documentation during this first initial exploration stage of the strategic planning, concerning the group’s composition, allowed on the one hand, the identification and mapping of opinions, basic assumptions and implicit understandings around research that needed to be surfaced, and on the other one the initiation of the co-creation of the strategic planning with the needed openness and implication of all participants.

Regarding the applicability of the model to managing research projects in other scientific research contexts, the type of participatory co-design described and the degree of involvement of the different layers of stakeholders probably require departing from reduced, cohesive teams and familiarity with principles of action research or community-based research, frequent in the social sciences. In this sense, it is important to highlight that, as detailed in the first part of the study, the concept of impact of research was regularly taken into account beyond the academic context, as a requisite to integrating in the strategic planning other perspectives that do not come from the scholarly context. As another relevant element derived from the results of the study, when prototyping the co-design process in connection with previous research on visual strategic planning (Eppler et al., 2006 ; Eppler and Platts, 2009 ), it should be noted that the iterative sequences of convergence and divergence of each phase allowed the described levels of participation and integration of perspectives. Again, considering it a strategic thinking process that is likely to be generalizable in research contexts in which, beyond academic and administrative tasks, there are conditions for the consideration of different types of research impact for initiatives in the medium and long term.

Regarding the second research question, the results pertaining to the impact of the co-created strategic planning on the group’s APM coordination and communication routines (and specifically data about terms related to the strategic plan) suggest that it contributed significantly to a shared vision and helped to deal with the inherent complexity of research activity (Fuster Morell, 2012 ). In this sense, with respect to the positive influence of a co-created strategic planning on the APM of research, our method provided results complementing previous studies (Rand and Eckfeldt, 2004 ). Specifically, we described how the integration of strategic goals with the agile management of daily tasks can serve as a parallel indicator to KPI used in strategic planning, and how such integration can provide immediate user-generated information for assessing the implementation of the plan (as compared to the usual retrospective checking of KPI over longer periods of time). Taking into account the need to connect strategic plans with managerial practices during the implementation phase (Poister, 2010 ), this combination of co-design techniques and AMP practices for the strategic planning of the Dimmons research group reflected the importance of design features and social mechanisms for successful strategic planning (Barzelay and Jacobsen, 2009 ). The data compared between the period prior to the strategic plan and its co-creation process suggest, on the one hand, an increase in the group’s cohesion through its daily communication and coordination channels, and on the other, an alignment in terms of discourse and follow-up of the objectives set. Again, in relation to being able to extrapolate the results of this process to other contexts, it is probably key to start with some previous experience with basic principles and practices of project management, and especially those based on AMP. However, as we reflect in the first part of the study, on the state of the art in social studies of science and team science with respect to the management of research projects, as well as the progressive need for mechanisms of efficiency and collaboration in academia, it is likely that this type of approach could be useful and produce similar results in other types of scientific and research initiatives.

Despite the above, the results also show a relevant imbalance between the accomplishment of some of the strategic goals after the first year of implementation of the strategic planning, with a significant dedication of efforts to “ecosystemic activity”. This suggests that, from an action research perspective, after the participative design process there was a greater priority given to the perceived need for addressing tasks related to community events, meetings with stakeholders, institutional agreements or online dissemination. In contrast, according to the data derived from the combination of KPI compared with the volume of specific tasks defined in the APM coordination channels, critical aspects of research management related to team building or open tools did not receive as much attention and effort in comparison. In our view, besides the experimental character of the case study (and the novelty of its research group focus), this result also relates to the current context of pressure and complexity within “accelerated” academic organisations (Vostal, 2016 ), which represents a challenge in front of competition for excellence (Sørensen et al., 2016 ) and the “projectification” of university research (Fowler et al., 2015 ). In this sense, in relation to the day-to-day activity of the group connecting strategic planning with co-creation principles of APM in research, it was observed that the experience also increased the need for the project management role or main facilitator of the entire co-creation process. In this regard, it was usually complicated to separate that function, as the guide of the participatory design of the strategic plan, from the wider role of APM coordinator.

This study’s limitations and potential mainly have to do with two areas. On the one hand, the content analysis of the kanban board covered an early stage of its adoption, but in comparison to the Telegram chat activity not all participants used the system with the same level of intensity and engagement. As explained in the results section, however, the relative coincidence with percentages of strategic-related terms between both channels suggests it worked as a relevant source of data for assessing the implementation of the strategic plan. In relation to the co-creation process, this limitation (related to an unequal adoption of APM coordination by the majority of the group), represented a challenge for some participants, and probably affected its impact during the implementation stage of some of the strategic goals. As mentioned, the degree of familiarity with digital tools for project coordination, as well as with internal discussion processes and personal positioning in research projects, seems a key factor that also requires future analysis in other academic contexts, to determine to what extent similar processes of co-creation and strategic thinking can be applied in the field of social sciences and in other disciplines. On the other hand, following this type of exploratory analysis, the need to observe and compare data generated by other research groups that apply similar (or different) methods for project management and strategic planning creates in our opinion a potential for future research, and would allow for further understanding of such an important area of meta-research. In this line, another analysis based on the case study of the Dimmons research group for a different period in the near future, in order to compare the evolution of KPI in parallel to communication and coordination related to tasks until 2023, would be needed to confirm some of our initial results.

Through this study we have described how strategic planning could be applied to research in order to confront current challenges in academic collaboration, and how to do so through the opportunities offered by co-creation methodologies applied to project management. Our analysis has identified potential benefits and challenges in this respect, suggesting further development of this field in the social sciences and action research, and proposing it as a possible area of research and development in parallel to other documented and studied efforts to deal with innovative and agile management of scholarly work. Besides an analysis of its impact at the communication and relational levels, our study also offers a detailed description about how co-creation for strategic planning in research could be applied, which could be of practical interest for scientific institutions in relation to their project management practices.

Data availability

Due to privacy reasons, the datasets analysed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Senabre Hidalgo, E., Fuster Morell, M. Co-designed strategic planning and agile project management in academia: case study of an action research group. Palgrave Commun 5 , 151 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0364-0

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This introduction to the special issue on strategic planning has four main parts. First comes a discussion of what makes public-sector strategic planning strategic. This discussion is meant to reduce confusion about what strategic planning is and is not. Next, we introduce in detail the five articles in the special issue and note their unique contributions to strategic planning research. Third, we provide a broad assessment of the current state of strategic planning research organized in terms of prominent themes in the literature and our assessment of how the articles address voids related to the themes. The themes are: how should strategic planning be conceptualized and defined? How should it be studied? How does strategic planning work, or not? What are the outcomes of strategic planning? What contributes to strategic planning success? Finally, we offer conclusions and an agenda for future research.

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• Strategic Planning Keyphrases 100%
• Planning Study Keyphrases 100%
• Planning Research Social Sciences 100%
• Public Sector Economics, Econometrics and Finance 100%
• Agenda for Future Research Keyphrases 10%
• Introduction to the Special Issue Keyphrases 10%
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T1 - Getting strategic about strategic planning research

AU - Bryson, John M.

AU - Edwards, Lauren Hamilton

AU - Van Slyke, David M.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2018/3/4

Y1 - 2018/3/4

N2 - This introduction to the special issue on strategic planning has four main parts. First comes a discussion of what makes public-sector strategic planning strategic. This discussion is meant to reduce confusion about what strategic planning is and is not. Next, we introduce in detail the five articles in the special issue and note their unique contributions to strategic planning research. Third, we provide a broad assessment of the current state of strategic planning research organized in terms of prominent themes in the literature and our assessment of how the articles address voids related to the themes. The themes are: how should strategic planning be conceptualized and defined? How should it be studied? How does strategic planning work, or not? What are the outcomes of strategic planning? What contributes to strategic planning success? Finally, we offer conclusions and an agenda for future research.

AB - This introduction to the special issue on strategic planning has four main parts. First comes a discussion of what makes public-sector strategic planning strategic. This discussion is meant to reduce confusion about what strategic planning is and is not. Next, we introduce in detail the five articles in the special issue and note their unique contributions to strategic planning research. Third, we provide a broad assessment of the current state of strategic planning research organized in terms of prominent themes in the literature and our assessment of how the articles address voids related to the themes. The themes are: how should strategic planning be conceptualized and defined? How should it be studied? How does strategic planning work, or not? What are the outcomes of strategic planning? What contributes to strategic planning success? Finally, we offer conclusions and an agenda for future research.

KW - Strategic planning

KW - performance

KW - strategic management

KW - strategy

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85012907674&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85012907674&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/14719037.2017.1285111

DO - 10.1080/14719037.2017.1285111

M3 - Editorial

AN - SCOPUS:85012907674

SN - 1471-9037

JO - Public Management Review

JF - Public Management Review

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The impact of sustainability strategic planning and management on the organizational sustainable performance: A developing-country perspective

دور التخطیط الاستراتیجی فی تحقیق الرشاقة التنظیمیة للمؤسسات العامة: دراسة تطبیقه على بعض البنوک الحکومیة المصریة the role of strategic planning in achieving organizational agility for public institutions - studying its application to some egyptian government banks, robust strategic planning of dynamic wireless charging infrastructure for electric buses, السودان و صراع المصالح الدولية : رؤية استراتيجية.

massive and varied natural resources which are available in strategic quantities, beside the strategic geographical location , in a way to study the impact of this situation on the National security.   The objective of stduy is to determine strategic vision in order to achieve the National strategic interests and the best way to deal with International interests conflict.   The most important findings of the study are : ■ The necessity of the national strategic planning as an important factor to achieve the strategic power needed to manage the international interests conflict.   ■ The necessity of developing a National mechanism to take Care of state strategic plan

Effect of Strategic Planning on the Sustainable Development of Regional Economy

The present research featured the issue of regional strategic planning as part of Russian economic system. The research objective was to study the role of strategic planning in improving the sustainable development of local economy. The study was based on the methods of analysis, synthesis, and grouping. The Strategy of Economic Development of Kuzbass through 2035 turned out to be more relevant in its content than previous strategies. The analysis of regional typology helped to identify a wider range of problems that aggravated or appeared over time. The problems were formulated as key priorities aimed at improving the life of local population and boosting the economic growth. The author believes that the main goal of the state regional policy is to reach and maintain a high level of economic development of the region. Regional policy is a set of legislative, administrative, and economic measures aimed at improving the quality of life and productive in the region. The state regional policy has the same economic orientation for all regions, which should be regulated by strategic planning, thus increasing the level of sustainable economic development.

Exploring Business Strategy Modelling with ArchiMate: A Case Study Approach

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a high-level abstraction of a business’ levels that aids in organizing planning and making better decisions. Researchers have concluded that the scope of EA is not focused only on technology planning but that the lack of business strategy and processes is the most important challenge of EA frameworks. The purpose of this article is to visualize the business strategy of a company using ArchiMate. Having a better understanding of how the concepts of strategic planning are used in businesses, we hope to improve their modelling with ArchiMate. This article adds to the existing literature by evaluating existing EA modelling languages and their skillfulness in model strategy. Furthermore, this article contributes to the identification of challenges in modelling and investigation of the ease of the use of language in the field of strategic planning. Furthermore, this article provides an approach to practitioners and EA architects who are attempting to develop efficient EA modelling projects and solve business complexity problems.

Redistribution and the Abolishment of Historical Entitlements in the CAP Strategic Plans: The Case of Greece

A key issue in CAP strategic planning in Greece is the treatment of historical entitlements. An unequal level of payments per hectare is difficult to justify in terms of the CAP’s rationale, and so the abolishment of these entitlements seems to be the most reasonable option. However, for historical reasons, this abolishment may result in a transfer of payments from smaller to larger farms and between different agricultural sub-sectors which could in turn lead to negative effects on the incomes of small farms and lead to farmers leaving the sector. We simulate the change to a flat rate payment in order to quantify these effects, then explore the possibility of employing the new obligatory redistribution measure, termed complementary income support, to mitigate any negative effects. We conclude that redistribution is, indeed, a powerful tool for fine-tuning decoupled payments if historical entitlements are to be abolished.

Government strategic planning: an integrative review of academic production

 Strategic planning is a deliberative, disciplined approach to producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it. Although strategic planning comes first from the private sector, it can, in fact, lead to successful strategy implementation in the public sector. Public institutions need to implement a performance management system in order to provide better public service to citizens, to promote sustainable public policies, to ensure a transparent decision making process, to spend the public money in an efficient and accountable way, and to achieve measurable results in implementing strategies, programs and projects. The objective of this study is to verify what is being studied in the field of government strategic planning in the past five years, considering articles indexed in the Web of Science database. The study shows that the main topics of concern are related to urban and metropolitan planning, reform and budget cuts, and studies verifying the effectiveness of strategic planning in the public sector.        O planeamento estratégico é uma abordagem deliberativa e disciplinada para produzir decisões e acções fundamentais que moldam e guiam o que uma organização é, o que faz, e porque o faz. Embora o planeamento estratégico venha primeiro do sector privado, pode, de facto, conduzir a uma implementação bem sucedida da estratégia no sector público. As instituições públicas precisam de implementar um sistema de gestão de desempenho a fim de prestar um melhor serviço público aos cidadãos, promover políticas públicas sustentáveis, assegurar um processo transparente de tomada de decisões, gastar o dinheiro público de forma eficiente e responsável, e alcançar resultados mensuráveis na implementação de estratégias, programas e projectos. O objectivo deste estudo é verificar o que está a ser estudado no campo do planeamento estratégico governamental nos últimos cinco anos, considerando artigos indexados na base de dados da Web of Science. O estudo mostra que os principais temas de preocupação estão relacionados com o planeamento urbano e metropolitano, reformas e cortes orçamentais, e estudos que verificam a eficácia do planeamento estratégico no sector público.                          

Coordination of sustainable financing for evidence-based youth mental health treatments: protocol for development and evaluation of the fiscal mapping process

Abstract Background Sustained delivery of evidence-based treatments (EBTs) is essential to addressing the public health and economic impacts of youth mental health problems, but is complicated by the limited and fragmented funding available to youth mental health service agencies (hereafter, “service agencies”). Strategic planning tools are needed that can guide these service agencies in their coordination of sustainable funding for EBTs. This protocol describes a mixed-methods research project designed to (1) develop and (2) evaluate our novel fiscal mapping process that guides strategic planning efforts to finance the sustainment of EBTs in youth mental health services. Method Participants will be 48 expert stakeholder participants, including representatives from ten service agencies and their partners from funding agencies (various public and private sources) and intermediary organizations (which provide guidance and support on the delivery of specific EBTs). Aim 1 is to develop the fiscal mapping process: a multi-step, structured tool that guides service agencies in selecting the optimal combination of strategies for financing their EBT sustainment efforts. We will adapt the fiscal mapping process from an established intervention mapping process and will incorporate an existing compilation of 23 financing strategies. We will then engage participants in a modified Delphi exercise to achieve consensus on the fiscal mapping process steps and gather information that can inform the selection of strategies. Aim 2 is to evaluate preliminary impacts of the fiscal mapping process on service agencies’ EBT sustainment capacities (i.e., structures and processes that support sustainment) and outcomes (e.g., intentions to sustain). The ten agencies will pilot test the fiscal mapping process. We will evaluate how the fiscal mapping process impacts EBT sustainment capacities and outcomes using a comparative case study approach, incorporating data from focus groups and document review. After pilot testing, the stakeholder participants will conceptualize the process and outcomes of fiscal mapping in a participatory modeling exercise to help inform future use and evaluation of the tool. Discussion This project will generate the fiscal mapping process, which will facilitate the coordination of an array of financing strategies to sustain EBTs in community youth mental health services. This tool will promote the sustainment of youth-focused EBTs.

Strategic Planning Customer Experience using Predictive Analysis Indihome PT Telkom

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Determinants of strategic planning effectiveness: extension of earlier work

Purpose – This paper aims to report the results of a study which extends the research of Elbanna by testing the relationship between strategic planning practice and participation on the one hand and the effectiveness of strategic planning on the other. Design/methodology/approach – The paper extends the work of Elbanna by conducting the study in a new setting, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a broader sample: private and public organizations. The study tries to control for the possible impact of the methodology on research results by adopting the same methods and measures as the initial study had adopted. Findings – The conclusions of the combined studies show that, in Arab countries, strategic planning practice enhances strategic planning effectiveness; unexpectedly, and contrary to previous research in developed economies, management participation does not contribute here to the effectiveness of strategic planning. Originality/value – Although previous research provides valuable knowledge concerning strategic planning, there has been a paucity of research that empirically measures the effectiveness of strategic planning. Moreover, the scarcity of replications and extensions in the strategic management literature encourages this study to try to fill this gap. The research also shows the importance of extensions in building strategic management theory.

Related Papers

Management Decision

Saïd Elbanna

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate relationships between strategic planning practice, management participation and strategic planning effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 87 questionnaires were collected from privately owned firms working in Egypt. Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. Findings – Strategic planning practice, but not management participation, is significantly associated with strategic planning effectiveness. Further, both strategic planning practice and management participation jointly enhance the effectiveness of strategic planning. Research limitations/implications – Longitudinal data would be needed in order to prove that causal relationships exist. The common method bias restricts the inferences that can be drawn from this study. It would be useful to explore whether the results hold when other integrative variables are taken into consideration. Practical implications – A wide use of strategic planning tools is one important element in organizational success. Originality/value – Little research has so far examined the use and worth of strategic planning tools in organizations. One function of this paper is to re-visit this area of research. It does so in one of the areas that have largely been neglected in past research in Arab countries. Keywords Strategic planning, Private sector organizations, Employee participation, Business performance, Egypt Paper type Research paper

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on the nature and practice of strategic planning in organizations working in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Design/methodology/approach – Given the nature of the data, questionnaires are collected from managers only. Personal delivery and pick-up system is used to collect the questionnaire. Sampled organizations are divided into 47 percent from the public sector and 53 percent from the private sector. Findings – A high percentage of organizations in the sample have moved beyond daily managing and are strategically planning for the future. Surprisingly, the findings indicate that there are relatively few significant differences among the four groups included in the paper, public versus private organizations and small versus large organizations. The paper also shows that the resources required for adopting a strategic planning approach do not form a significant obstacle; and the higher the position, the more likely is participation in the strategic planning process. Originality/value – This paper, which can be considered as among the first studies to report on the practice of strategic planning in the Arab region, provides us with a profile of organizations working in the UAE regarding the practice of strategic planning within them.

Jehad Aldehayyat

Strategic Change

This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature of strategic management by providing a profile of organizations working in Egypt regarding their practice of strategic planning. Based upon responses from 120 organizations, the respondents have a positive attitude towards strategic planning.
There are relatively few significant differences in the findings between manufacturing and service organizations compared with the differences between local and foreign organizations and also between small and large organizations. Unexpectedly, a high percentage of the respondents are not familiar with some of what are seen as the traditional tools of strategic management.

Information Management and Business Review

Farideh Delavari

Several authors argued that strategic planning is limited and not producing the needed outcomes. In today’s increasingly challenging environment, it is argued that public sector organizations are expected to shift from traditional strategic planning to the strategic management approach in order to achieve their desired outcomes. Previous research has focused almost upon developed, and not on developing countries, for instance, the Kingdom of Bahrain. This study will be the first of its kind to focus on strategic management practices based on the new strategy of Bahrain for 2030. Using quantitative survey method, this paper aims to explore the progress of the transition from strategic planning to the strategic management approach in the public sector of Bahrain, and then the paper explores the elements that are related to successful strategic management approach in these organizations. The findings reveal that the progress in the transition from strategic planning to a strategic mana...

gaafar abdalkrim

SSRN Electronic Journal

Christian Ax

kenny githungo migwi

This paper focuses on the impact of strategic planning in Omani.

nurlia puspitasari

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Strategic Planning Research Paper

View sample Strategic Planning Research Paper. Browse research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a management research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

This research-paper deals with the use of strategic planning in new ventures and young small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It provides interesting insights into the topics of small business management and entrepreneurship and it particularly investigates characteristics of SMEs, the nature of strategic planning, the role of the entrepreneur in strategic processes, the elements of strategic planning in new ventures and young SMEs, and the benefits of and reasons against the application of strategic planning.

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SMEs continue to play an increasingly important role in major economies around the globe. They employ more than half of all private-sector employees in the United States, are responsible for half of the gross domestic product (GDP), and generate between 60% and 80% of net new jobs per year. According to most definitions, small enterprises are firms that employ fewer than 100 employees, whereas medium-sized enterprises may employ up to 500 employees. Especially new business ventures, which are virtually always a subgroup of SMEs, have been a popular topic of academic research since Birch (1979) found that small firms create more new jobs than large firms.

Because SMEs are increasingly regarded as an important source of innovation, employment, and competition within industries, the search for factors that might facilitate the success of these businesses is growing (Carter, Stearns,  Reynolds, & Miller, 1994). Such factors are of high importance not only to scientists, but also to politicians, entrepreneurs, and managers, because SMEs and particularly new ventures are threatened with high failure rates and low profit margins. Besides popular research topics and already proven influence factors such as human capital (e.g., level of education, experience, etc.), strategic planning can be considered one of these factors. Indeed, several empirical research studies reveal a link between strategic planning and corporate performance.

Due to an extensive application of strategic management techniques in large companies and a widely accepted notion that rational economic decision making should prevail in enterprises regardless of their size, practitioners and academics alike have recently called for a more substantial use of strategic planning in SMEs. Rue and Ibrahim (1998) even argue that strategic planning is one of the key issues for SMEs. Most strategic concepts and techniques are considered to be irrespective of company size. Nonetheless, SMEs normally dispose of a lower level of resources, have limited access to target markets, and possess an insufficiently developed administration. Thus, the application of formal strategic planning mechanisms is often missing, especially up to a certain “critical size” of the company (Karagozoglu & Lindell, 1998).

Ineffective deployment of strategic planning can even be considered the main reason for failure to achieve expected or projected performance in many firms. However, in real business, a major weakness that is often inherent in SME management is the absence of top management’s economic knowledge or its overorientation toward technical problem solving. Accordingly, strategic techniques are only rarely applied to SMEs. Formal plans and/or market-related result or cost controls are often only provided on an irregular basis. Additionally, a small number of individuals usually derive the respective techniques, which they develop intuitively rather than theoretically. Building on this, an important issue to address is the value of strategic planning for new ventures and young SMEs.

This research-paper of 21st Century Management therefore explores how and to what extent new ventures and young SMEs apply strategic planning within the scope of their business activities. Specifically, questions addressed include why these companies seem to plan less than large companies, whether strategic planning and corporate performance correlate with each other, and whether strategic planning is a function of increasing company size. The suggestion that enterprises that plan strategically are more successful than those that do not implies that, building on existing empirical initial evidence, new ventures and young SMEs reveal a lower degree of strategic planning (e.g., Gibson & Cassar, 2002), since large companies would generally be more successful than SMEs. However, this seems unlikely.

Strategy Formulation In SMEs

Characteristics of smes.

Compared to large companies, SMEs tend to offer a more limited range of products on a more limited number of markets, and use market penetration and product development strategies rather than market development or diversification strategies. Moreover, since SMEs mainly operate in a single or a limited number of markets with a limited number of products or services, they usually cannot afford central service departments that are able to conduct complex market analyses and studies (Johnson & Scholes, 1997). In addition, they usually have fewer resources and more limited access to human and financial capital. As a result, the application of formal planning mechanisms is often missing.

Despite their relatively small market power, SMEs’ small size and flexibility permits them to specialize in narrow niches that are generally less interesting for larger enterprises due to the relatively small sales volumes and their high fixed costs. In addition, SMEs’ limited resources result in a concentration on a small product range where strong competitive advantages and specific problem-solving competencies can be built up, for instance with regard to qualitative market leadership. Higher decision flexibility and direct customer contacts are particularly helpful for the conversion of research and development (R&D) results into marketable innovations, although nondiversification risks remain in terms of overdependency on only a few products.

The Nature Of Strategic Planning

No single subject has dominated the attention of managers, consultants, and academic researchers as much as the subject of “corporate strategy.” Therefore, during the last 2 decades, the attribute “strategic” has almost become a buzzword. Particularly in the United States, an almost countless number of related articles have been published.

From a corporate perspective, strategy can be defined as an approach utilized to reach the company’s goals in order to be successful on a long-term basis. Corporate strategy is an area within management science that is concerned with the general direction and long-term policy of the business in contrast to short-term tactics and day-to-day business operations. Strategic management thus means management in pursuit of and on the basis of a corporate strategy. The discipline of strategic management formed in the 1980s is based on advancements in the field of strategic planning. Strategic management mainly deals with matching the activities of the business to the resources as well as to the environment in order to maximize the opportunities and minimize the threats. One of the most important approaches since these days is the so-called SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, by which a firm can assess its market and the environmental conditions impacting on its strategic plan.

The most important element of strategic management is strategic planning. In general, strategic planning is regarded as long-term oriented (at least 3 years), directed toward future yield potentials, substantial and holistic in nature, and predominantly associated with the highest management level determining the vision, mission, and culture of the enterprise. Strategic planning is the attempt to prepare for all eventualities by abstraction and thus to account for the complexity and the dynamics of the environment. This entails the need to build alternative future scenarios and configurations. Although no one can foresee the future, it is possible to prepare for the future and/or alternative futures and align the enterprise accordingly.

In contrast to strategic management, strategic planning is not about visionary future concepts, but rather about extrapolating present development tendencies into the future. Hence, it does not provide visions but, more specifically, guidelines and programs for the achievement of specific goals. Consequently, strategic planning specifies the basic conditions and the scope of future business activities, and thereby is a fundamental element for strategic management, which, in turn, is responsible for goals and visions.

Bracker and Pearson (1986) have developed a scheme that divides planning in SMEs into four categories:

• Unstructured planning
• Intuitive planning
• Formal operative (short-term) planning
• Formal strategic (long-term) planning

In the context of new ventures and young SMEs, strategic planning is of particular interest since strategies for these SMEs have to be developed in a highly emergent way (Mintzberg, 1994), reflecting their fast-changing requirements.

The Role of the Entrepreneur

Management of SMEs and new ventures is always an integral part of entrepreneurship. The word “entrepreneur-ship” is derived from the French “entreprendre,” which can be translated as “to undertake” or “to take in one’s own hands” (Schaper & Volery, 2004). The real entrepreneurial work is about bringing new ideas into actual ventures that exploit market opportunities by better serving the customers’ needs.

The entrepreneur does not necessarily have to be the inventor of the new product, service, or business—but he or she is the one introducing this innovation to the market place. Entrepreneurs are therefore people who take something (e.g., an opportunity or a business venture) into their own hands, at their own risk.

In most SMEs, usually only top-level management (i.e., the entrepreneur him- or herself) is responsible for the development and deployment of strategic plans. Hence, the role of entrepreneur is always critical for the whole strategic process. Next to the entrepreneur, who is legitimized to do so via ownership, external (employed) managers, such as a CEO, may lead such an enterprise.

Due to the size of the enterprise, the entrepreneur is most deeply rooted in day-to-day business operations and thus is also involved in all levels of decision making, some of which occur simultaneously. Accordingly, personal goals, characteristics, and the entrepreneur’s strategic awareness have an important influence on the development of the enterprise, and often the rate of strategic planning sophistication is a function of the entrepreneur’s previous experience.

Besides, the process of strategic decision making in SMEs is often not only based on experience, but also on intuition or guessing. Therefore, strategic decisions mostly reflect the subjective orientations and attitudes of the entrepreneur. The role of the entrepreneur and his or her attitude toward strategic issues are thus often critical for the implementation of planning measures. Planning is an activity without direct returns, which is hard to justify (psychologically), either if customers are flocking to the company or if they are hard to come by and marketing and sales activities appear more important.

Although business schools regularly stress the relationship between strategic planning and corporate performance, only approximately 20% of all college graduates obtain their degrees in management science. Academic research shows that education has a significant influence on strategic activities; the probability to think and act strategically grows with the level of education. Especially for business graduates, the probability of having written a business plan is much higher than for their nonbusiness counterparts.

However, since many entrepreneurs have not graduated from college or have obtained their degrees in nonbusiness areas, it follows that many have limited knowledge of the strategic planning discipline and therefore limited managerial qualifications. Moreover, entrepreneurs have different aversions against strategic planning and the application of formal methods such as strategic planning.

Reasons Against Strategic Planning in SMEs

In real-life business, preparation mostly comes through strategic planning. Many SME owners and managers routinely plan their daily operations, but do not believe that strategic planning applies to them or are not sure if strategic planning will improve corporate performance.

Even though most authors agree that strategic planning can be very useful for SMEs, few of these firms utilize this and instead follow the strategy of “muddling through” (Porter 1985). The reason for this is that many decision makers in SMEs are still convinced that “real entrepreneurs don’t plan” (Posner, 1985). An entrepreneur who has done fairly well so far without strategic planning might also simply be reluctant to change.

Academic research has derived several factors that inhibit the use of formal planning in SMEs. From the entrepreneur’s perspective, the major objections against the use of strategic processes in SMEs are that

• strategic measures and techniques constrain flexibility and the ability for improvisation;
• it makes more sense to use the limited time resources for operational or sales activities or research and development (R&D) than for strategy-formulation processes; and
• strategic management is too bureaucratic.

The true reasons behind such aversions are often deficient know-how, overestimation of one’s own capabilities, rejection of external help, thinking in traditions, or fear of far-reaching changes.

Nonetheless, especially in times of increasing dynamics and uncertainty, it is vital to stay informed about corporate goals and their attainment on a regular basis. The strategy-formulation process therefore should be regarded as a future investment. Although the majority of the well-known strategy concepts mostly originating in the 1980s have been developed for big companies, which generally display a higher awareness for existing problems and can hence allocate more resources to this issue, some of the strategic concepts and techniques also seem to be suitable for implementation in SMEs. One of the main benefits of strategic planning lies in the predictability of possible future scenarios and variations. Besides, no business is too small to require a sound strategy, and few strategies are so simple that they do not have to be developed into some form of a strategic plan.

Strategic Planning For Small Enterprises

Strategic planning in new ventures.

In the recent years, governmental, nongovernmental, and educational institutions have dedicated a large effort toward the promotion and training of strategic thinking as well as actual strategic planning activities for entrepreneurship. The rationale behind this is that every business, regardless of its size, should have some form of strategic plan. Founders of new ventures always follow some sort of strategy to reach their goals, although these strategies are not always highly rational or explicit. In the case of SMEs, however, this strategy may be represented by the manager’s general thoughts. Only with increasing size, the strategic plan becomes more formal and elaborate. This formal document is called a business plan.

In general, a business plan is the written form of the firm’s overall strategic plan, which aims to put in place tools, techniques, and processes that identify and achieve the business’s long-term goals. A business plan addresses key questions about the vision an enterprise strives to achieve and the operational details about how it aims to get there. It can thus be defined as “a written document that describes the current state and the presupposed future of an organization” (Honig & Karlsson, 2004, p. 29). In other words, a business plan collects and summarizes all information that is relevant for the business. It is accordingly some form of the entrepreneur’s “game plan.” A business plan legitimizes the new venture proposal and serves furthermore as a means of communication with external stakeholders, especially potential investors. The business plan can therefore be regarded as both the first step in the strategic planning process as well as its overall documentation.

A business plan covers the long-term focus of the business as well as operational issues such as marketing, operations, and financing. The major elements of a typical business plan include an executive summary, the firm’s background including detailed relevant information about the founding persons, the firm’s resources, the product, marketing details, operational arrangements, and financial projections as well as a timetable for implementation (Schaper & Volery, 2004).

Surprisingly, so far only few academic researchers have dealt explicitly with the business plans of SMEs. A business plan is usually regarded as a rational activity that assists the entrepreneur to make larger profits. It was found that contents of business plans and their implementation can play an important role in effective planning. It is a commonly accepted assumption that business plans are made by rational economic actors.

Writing a formal business plan is widely regarded as one of the most important aspects of strategic planning. The existence of a business plan is widely regarded as a valid indicator for the firm’s attitude toward strategic planning. The underlying assumption is that a written business plan represents good planning (Heriot & Campbell, 2004).

Formal written plans are widely considered better than informal, unwritten plans because they foster critical thinking, group decision making, and internal as well as external communication, and furthermore serve as a control mechanism for possible course corrections (Baker, Addams, & Davis, 1993). Start-ups with business plans seem to have better access to external money (from banks, venture capitalist companies, etc.), and are therefore more likely to actually go into business. Particularly for small businesses, the development of a business plan is widely called for in order to enable financing for internal and external communication and as a control mechanism.

Yet in real life, many businesses—sometimes more than half of the interviewed companies—lack a solid business plan and the majority write one only when external funding is needed. This refers to the widespread assumption of banks, business angels, and venture capitalists that business plans are necessary for success. Nevertheless, the existence of a business plan prior to new-venture founding contributes positively to corporate performance (i.e., profitability) as well as to the survival of the companies (Kraus & Schwarz, 2007).

Strategic Planning In Young SMEs

As conventional wisdom and empirical evidence seem to ascertain, strategic planning is a concept that marks out successful companies. Strategic planning may assist entrepreneurs in recognizing the breadth and complexity of their business. The level of uncertainty is reduced by providing a better understanding of the circumstances of its business, and hence to better prepare for the future. Accordingly, strategic planning helps to cope with the insecurities of businesses, and thus brings a beneficial value for the future, even above the sole acquisition of capital. It saves time and enhances management professionalism after start up.

Furthermore, it promotes long-term thinking, reduces the focus on operational details, and provides a structure for the identification and evaluation of strategic alternatives.

For these reasons, several authors found a positive statistical relationship for corporate performance and ongoing strategic planning. Especially long-term formal strategic planning has been shown to have a positive relationship to performance (e.g., Kraus, Harms, & Schwarz, 2006). The pure process of (formal) planning itself already seems to have a positive effect in that it leads to a better understanding of the business and to a broader range of strategic alternatives. Formal strategic planning is elementary for long-term growth and development of small businesses.

Further empirical studies also demonstrate that formal strategic planning can be beneficial for survival and growth of small enterprises. For example, in a longitudinal analysis Sexton and Van Auken (1985) found that the survival rates of SMEs conducting formal strategic planning are higher. Lyles, Baird, Orris, and Kuratko (1993) state that a more advanced and more detailed strategic planning results in a more substantial corporate growth.

Elements of Strategic Planning in New Ventures and Young SMEs

The following paragraphs describe the most important elements of strategic planning with special consideration of their relevance for new ventures and young SMEs.

Visionary Strategy Conception

Strategy is based on the development of a vision of how the future will unfold and the company’s role in it. This necessarily includes interactions between actors and environmental conditions as well as the change resulting from it. The vision is to help the organization develop a sustainable and advantageous position in competition with other actors under possibly radically changing conditions.

Goals and Objectives

Strategic management literature recommends that a company set goals or objectives, which allow for later evaluation of performance. Such goals are derived from the superordinate vision, but should be more grounded in reality and based on reasonable estimations achieved through data collection of similar businesses and competitors. Of course, setting the corporate goals is the responsibility of top management, but middle management should also be included in setting them at functional levels. Especially in the case of new ventures, the entrepreneur will most likely be responsible for both: the overall corporate goals as well as the functional goals, since there is not yet a middle management. The goals and the strategies to achieve them should be regularly controlled and updated or adapted, if necessary (Moyer, 1982).

Core Competencies

Strategic planning always includes an evaluation of the firm’s distinctive competencies, i.e., the particular and hardly imitable skills and strengths. This might be a unique combination of resources, such as innovations, products, production facilities, or patents, but may also include a company’s personnel, financial situation, or product development record (Moyer, 1982). If a core competency yields a long-term advantage to the company, it can bring the firm a sustainable competitive advantage.

In the context of new ventures or young SMEs, the core competence is often the innovation upon which the business model is grounded. This might, for example, be a truly innovative, novel product or service idea (in the Schumpeterian sense), or a recombination of already existing elements that are put together in a way that provides more customer service. The core competencies of a firm can be discovered by the use of the SWOT analysis (see the subsequent section in this research-paper “Strategic Techniques”).

Planning Horizons

Although planning often tends to center around yearly budgeting, real strategic planning is likely to be longer term. Usually, a time horizon of about 3 years is used in larger firm strategic planning (Rue & Ibrahim, 1998).

SMEs are frequently said to be more flexible than larger ones, and they often do not yet possess the necessary experience and knowledge to plan ahead for such a long time. The question is how long the optimal time horizon of strategic planning should be in small firms (Moyer, 1982). Empirical evidence shows that the average time frame for strategic planning in young SMEs is about 18 months (Kraus, Harms, & Schwarz, 2006), and thus only half as long as most strategy textbooks propose. Accordingly, it can be concluded that long-term strategic planning in new ventures and young SMEs is simply shorter than in large, established enterprises.

Formal Strategic Planning

We have already highlighted the great importance of formal strategic planning. A formal strategic plan implies a deliberate means to systematically include factors and techniques in order to achieve specified goals. Formal strategic planning can lead to a better understanding of the business and to the discovery of a broader range of strategic alternatives. Further, firms with a formal strategic planning approach are more likely to give more active consideration to potential barriers from the outside. A key component of strategic planning in small and young firms is the business plan (see the previous section in this research-paper, “Strategic Planning in New Ventures”).

Informal planning, on the other hand, has only limited value, since only a few planning areas can be dealt with at the same time, whereas a formal plan allows for a synopsis of multiple planning areas. Thus, the entrepreneur is able to see connections that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

It can be concluded that firms that apply formal strategic planning also attach great importance to the quality of the strategic decision-making processes and that decision makers develop larger knowledge of the strategic issues through the process of planning. Nevertheless, in real business life, most independently owned SMEs have a less structured approach to strategic planning deployment, and very often only plan intuitively and informally.

Strategic Techniques

Strategic techniques do not make strategy, nor do they implement strategy. Rather, they are tools that help align strategic thinking. They can be used for the identification of a firm’s goals and strategies and for the presentation of complex issues, and can therefore serve as an important communication device. Among the techniques that might be able to be used in SMEs are the analysis of financial data, and the SWOT analysis (the inclusion of a company’s own strengths/weaknesses in comparison to that of the competition as well as the chances/risks in the market).

One of the most important elements of the SWOT analysis is the environmental analysis, which includes changes in the economic, social, cultural, political, or business environment that might affect the firm’s business. The other major element of the SWOT analysis is the customer analysis, since customers are the key to enterprise success. Customer analysis includes questions such as where they prefer to buy the products, what attributes the product should have, and how markets could be segmented (Moyer, 1982).

Other well-known strategic techniques, such as benchmarking, GAP analysis, or Balanced Scorecard, which could also be used in smaller enterprises, are often unfamiliar to entrepreneurs, especially when they do not have an educational background in management science. Also techniques like portfolio (such as the Boston Consulting Group or the McKinsey/General Electric matrices) or product life cycle analysis are usually more widespread in larger firms, since most small or young firms simply do not possess multiple products and their product is not in an advanced phase of its life cycle.

The use of several strategic techniques are beneficial for the strategic planning process in new ventures and SMEs, as empirical evidence suggests. Nonetheless, we must keep in mind that “how well” is often not the same as “how much”; it depends on the right choice of strategic techniques, not on the pure number.

The implementation of a strategy and of the measures required to attain it must be measured in order to provide feedback to the employees and managers on their situation.

Even the best plan might not produce the desired results due to various unforeseen circumstances that are internal or external to the enterprise. Therefore, measuring actual against planned performance regularly and taking remedial action on factors causing unfavorable deviations from the plan are important to maximize the results anticipated through strategic planning. This is needed when current developments diverge from the predicted trends that were underlying the previous plans.

Control enables long-term plans to be adjusted in a flexible way. Frequent control helps to change the plans and respond to the new circumstances quickly and thus in a cost-efficient way. Control not only helps detect irregularities, but also helps companies handle complex situations, cope with uncertainty, and identify opportunities.

Do SMEs Plan Strategically?

Existing literature gives adequate evidence that planning in SMEs does not always take place in a highly sophisticated way. The actual process of decision making often deviates substantially from the ideal picture of rationality. Planning in SMEs seems to be rather unstructured, sporadic, incremental, and often informal.

However, it remains unclear whether SMEs do not plan strategically at all or whether they simply do not plan in a formal way (i.e., intuitively). The latter (the entrepreneur’s ideas) would be the minimal approach to planning. Along these lines, it could be that not only strategic planning itself, but also the quality of the planning process play an important role. Many small-business entrepreneurs are successful without explicitly practicing strategic planning (Pleitner, 1989). It therefore seems reasonable to assume that each form of planning, whether it is conscious or unconscious, formal or informal, can also affect entrepreneurial success.

Building on these notions, it can be assumed that people in most SMEs do at least think strategically. A conscious or formal strategic process, however, mostly takes place in the head of a very small number of employees. Due to the well-accepted view that strategies can limit an SME’s scope of activity too much, thereby reducing its flexibility, many SMEs are still lacking written strategic plans. Strategic awareness and the involvement of the entrepreneur could offset the lack of formal strategic planning as an output of strategic management. The degree of the entrepreneur’s strategic orientation thus seems to be a key factor for the strategic focus of the enterprise.

Furthermore, small and large enterprises differ considerably in the size and type of resources. It thus appears doubtful to develop “standard” strategies and techniques that are equally effective in big companies and SMEs. As the use of strategic planning also seems to be worthwhile in SMEs, the respective techniques must be aligned with the personnel as well as the cultural, organizational, and financial conditions of the specific enterprise in order to be successful.

The notion that there are differences in strategic goals between small and larger enterprises entails the need to also differentiate between the goals of different small enterprises. Generally speaking, goals depend on the situation of enterprises and their market niches. Overall, it is plausible to assume that the problems of different SME types will vary. Likewise, a distinction between types of SMEs is clearly needed at least in terms of age and market situation. While public interest mainly concentrates on SMEs as potential generators of growth, only a subset of these enterprises will live up to these expectations. Thus, the procedural instructions and techniques for these enterprises will differ accordingly and must be tailored to the individual case. This implies that there will also be differences in terms of necessary and/or suitable techniques of strategic planning and the resulting output. As a result, the measurable economic performance of an enterprise and thus the correlation between corporate performance and the use of planning techniques will also depend on the particular type of enterprise. For example, considerable strategic differences exist between small, mature enterprises in a stable and specialized niche on the one hand and young, growth-oriented enterprises on the other hand. While the former aim at securing their market position, further developing their technology, and closely satisfying their customers’ needs in order to increase profits, young, growth-oriented enterprises will rather—after testing the functional capacity of their business model and their niche—shift their focus toward extending the market niche and their respective market share as soon as possible. This situation requires tools and techniques that focus much more on learning and sense making for small enterprises than they do for large ones.

It seems, therefore, that the central question is not whether strategic planning in SMEs is fruitful, but for which groups of SMEs and under which circumstances it is worthwhile. Enterprise characteristics differ significantly between young, small ventures and established, large companies, and so do the strategic imperatives that can be derived for each enterprise type.

Benefits Of Strategic Planning

While some authors (e.g., Bhidé, 2000) argue that planning offers little advantage to small businesses, it is argued here that formal strategic planning can enhance management skills. The pure process of developing a business plan causes management to actively deal with the enterprise’s goals, strategies, and plans. In doing so, management attains a larger knowledge of possible alternatives and its environment. In this vein, it can be argued that every enterprise, regardless of size, needs an effective, comprehensive business plan, as it enables its decision makers to engage with the reality of the business world rather than the common dream world. Management thus regards the business plan as the first step toward success. Moreover, formal written plans are regarded as more effective since the formulation process itself promotes critical thinking and group decisions (Baker, Addams, & Davis, 1993).

Nevertheless, strategic planning may be a substantial factor for small business performance. Even so, it is worth mentioning that the best business plan is only of limited use if it is not implemented. The importance of the business plan as a facilitating tool for future entrepreneurs must be emphasized. Additionally, the process of strategic planning should not be a one-off, but moreover a continuous action including the adaptation of former goals and strategies within a changing environment, which is valid especially for young and small businesses. Therefore, a business plan should not be limited to the start up of an enterprise, but instead also used as a continuous working document for ongoing strategic planning during all times of enterprise development and growth.

Despite the fact that small and large enterprises differ considerably in size and type of resources, we can assume that decision makers of SMEs do apply planning, although in many cases they do so rather intuitively and/or informally. Moreover, businesses, independently from their size, seem to be capable of executing some of the most important strategic techniques (such as the SWOT analysis). Since the link between the use of these strategic techniques and corporate performance should prevail in SMEs, it is essential to foster a respective awareness in the enterprise. Since SMEs are rarely “small-sized big enterprises,” the existing concepts and techniques have to be adapted accordingly. It does not appear to make sense to develop “standard” strategies and techniques that are equally effective in big companies and SMEs. As the use of strategic planning also seems to be worthwhile in SMEs, the respective techniques must be aligned with the personnel as well as the cultural, organizational, and financial conditions of the specific enterprise.

An analysis of extant academic literature on the topic indicates that strategic planning in SMEs is subject to unique characteristics and influences. Although a high relevance of strategic planning in the context of SME management does exist, its extent and design differ from larger (multiproduct, multidivisional) companies. Accordingly, research needs to devote more time to the analysis of the idiosyncrasies of this corporate sector to advance our understanding of strategic planning in SMEs and derive valuable recommendations for research and practice.

Overall, we can state that strategic planning seems beneficial not only for large enterprises, but also for the performance of new ventures and SMEs. Formal planning in particular can be considered as being particularly useful if knowledge about the environment is scarce such as at the beginning of the life of an enterprise, in a fast-changing environment, or when management is “new” to a market,

technology, product, or business model. If the environment is well known and stable, informal plans might well suffice. However, if an organization becomes larger, its complexity and environmental exposure require more formal planning. Different organizational characteristics between SMEs, new ventures, and young enterprises, and their relation to planning implementation and entrepreneurial performance need to be explicitly considered in this endeavor.

The implementation of formalized strategic planning can nevertheless be expected to be favorable independent of company size and level of development, although in practice a positive relationship between increasing company size and the implementation of strategic planning techniques could be measured. This finding is likely to be correlated with—if not caused by—the increasing need for uncertainty reduction about the enterprise’s role in its environment, an increasing attention to similar details, and an ability to cope with matters in a “mechanistic” fashion. By the time an enterprise has grown too big for one person to manage, management by instinct alone will not be sufficient, and the necessity for strategic planning arises. In that respect, scientific literature provides evidence that the use of strategic planning methods and techniques is dependent on increasing company size, and thus that SMEs do seem to plan less than established larger enterprises. Future research should therefore address these restrictions and attempt to gain deeper insight into type, extent, and alignment of strategic management techniques in SMEs and the resulting consequences for corporate performance.

Over the lifetime of an enterprise, formal strategic planning is relatively high at the beginning when the enterprise is still small, and it is again high when the organization has reached a certain complexity due to its increase in size and number of tasks undertaken. During intermediate levels of organizational size and age, formal planning might be less required because the enterprise is usually established in a relatively certain business context, where there is a certain level of task repetition and the organization has not yet reached high levels of complexity. Environmental characteristics, which can be split into the subfactors of dynamics (of environmental change) and complexity (of environmental forces), modulate the level of formal planning requirements.

The danger of formal planning conversely is that it might make strategy and management overly rigid when change is needed. On the other hand, informal methods of planning favor unconscious shifts of strategy, which may endanger attainment of goals when a stable, strict course is required.

Of course, larger enterprises can better justify the planning costs, but strategic planning does seem to make sense in smaller enterprises, too. So, what should practitioners do with this information? First, owner-managers who already know strategic concepts from their undergraduate business studies or MBA programs have a clear advantage. But because of the many flexible further education programs that exist today, either in form of part-time or distance learning university education or even textbooks, there is not much “wisdom” left in the concepts of strategic management, although the fact remains that most of the literature has been written for large(r) enterprises. These concepts accordingly need to be adapted for the needs of smaller ones.

Accordingly, implications for scientists, educators, and consultants include increasing the awareness and sensitivity for formal strategic planning in new ventures and young SMEs. The staff of governmental, nongovernmental, and academic institutions should be more strongly encouraged to train entrepreneurs in preparing business plans such as through workshops or business plan competitions. Effective strategic planning must be grasped and “learned” by all decision makers within the company in order to be effective.

Although a business plan can never guarantee success (Crawford-Lucas, 1992), its preparation, existence, and application can at least be an important help in avoiding failure of small businesses, which can in turn be fruitful for the respective economy. This research-paper thus contributes to work on small businesses since it shows that planning does make sense in small businesses. In parallel, this study also holds some interesting implications for practitioners. First, it shows that entrepreneurs should thoroughly write business plans before starting their businesses, even if they are keen to start as soon as possible. By developing a business plan in advance, entrepreneurs can discover possible risks or deficits of their business and thus reduce the likelihood of failure and increase the likelihood for financial success. In short, if you want to be more successful, obtain more knowledge of the strategic planning process.

Although many SMEs and young ventures engage in at least some degree of strategic planning, they should ensure that their written business plans are constantly being evaluated and corrections undertaken. In order to ensure maximum impact, open communication with all managers and employees is mandatory.

Baker, Addams, and Davis (1993) have further developed a four-phase approach for effective strategic planning:

• Development of a strategic plan with a long-time horizon (typically 3 years) that includes the firm’s vision, mission, core competencies as well as a SWOT analysis.
• Preparation of a written business plan for top-management purposes.
• Communication and implementation of the business plan.
• Constant formal review (control), at least quarterly, including necessary corrections and adaptations when environmental circumstances change. (Strategic planning is always a dynamic process; it implies change.)

Following these phases can help increase organizational effectiveness. In the worst-case scenario, strategic planning in new ventures and SMEs would result in the enterprise knowing where it would stand without planning.

Bibliography:

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Title: smart help: strategic opponent modeling for proactive and adaptive robot assistance in households.

Abstract: Despite the significant demand for assistive technology among vulnerable groups (e.g., the elderly, children, and the disabled) in daily tasks, research into advanced AI-driven assistive solutions that genuinely accommodate their diverse needs remains sparse. Traditional human-machine interaction tasks often require machines to simply help without nuanced consideration of human abilities and feelings, such as their opportunity for practice and learning, sense of self-improvement, and self-esteem. Addressing this gap, we define a pivotal and novel challenge Smart Help, which aims to provide proactive yet adaptive support to human agents with diverse disabilities and dynamic goals in various tasks and environments. To establish this challenge, we leverage AI2-THOR to build a new interactive 3D realistic household environment for the Smart Help task. We introduce an innovative opponent modeling module that provides a nuanced understanding of the main agent's capabilities and goals, in order to optimize the assisting agent's helping policy. Rigorous experiments validate the efficacy of our model components and show the superiority of our holistic approach against established baselines. Our findings illustrate the potential of AI-imbued assistive robots in improving the well-being of vulnerable groups.

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Resolving Workforce Skills Gaps with AI-Powered Insights

Ongoing digital transformation requires a workforce that is proficient in a wide variety of new skills. This briefing explores the use of AI in quantifying such proficiency, through a process known as skills inference. We introduce this concept by means of a case study of Johnson & Johnson, showing how skills inference can provide detailed insight into workforce skills gaps and thereby guide employees’ career development and leaders’ strategic workforce planning.

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Digital transformation is a continuous journey, with new technologies emerging on an ongoing basis. Yet for organizations to harness these technologies, their workforce needs to develop an increasingly expanding variety of skills. Many organizations struggle here: leaders responding to a 2022 MIT CISR survey[foot]MIT CISR 2022 Decision Rights for the Digital Era Survey (N=342).[/foot] estimated that on average 38 percent of their organization’s workforce required fundamental retraining or replacement within three years to address workforce skills gaps.[foot]Workforce skills gaps are the discrepancy between the collective skills proficiency that an organization requires to achieve its strategic objectives and the current skills proficiency of its workforce.[/foot]

To make evidence-based decisions on how to best resolve such skills gaps, however, organizations first need to move beyond estimates. What’s required is precise insight into their workforce’s current skills and how proficiency in these skills differs from that needed for future success. Functional competency models often fall short in this regard, as they need to be validated for each job and thus can’t keep pace with rapid technological change. Relying on employee or manager feedback from interviews and surveys may lead to inaccuracies because of inherent biases. And active assessment of an entire workforce across a wide range of skills is both impractical and costly.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a new and scalable alternative to such approaches by enabling skills inference , which we define as the process of analyzing employee data to quantify skills proficiency. This allows for detailed insight into workforce skills gaps, which can, for instance, be broken down by line of business and geography. In this briefing we explore the AI-powered skills inference process, and illustrate how resulting insights can help resolve workforce skills gaps by drawing on lessons learned from a case study of global healthcare company Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Digital Talent Transformation at J&J

J&J’s mission is to profoundly impact health for humanity. As the trajectory of health and wellbeing is increasingly determined by emerging technology and a growth in data and computing power, J&J’s Technology group has become a cornerstone for the organization’s future success. It drives technological innovation at J&J and modernizes the organization’s tech ecosystem. More importantly, however, the Technology group is enabling J&J to evolve as a digital organization by helping to develop the digital acumen of its global workforce of over 130,000 employees.[foot]This case study of J&J draws from N. van der Meulen, O. Tona, I. A. Someh, B. H. Wixom, and D. E. Leidner, “Developing a Digital-First Workforce: AI-Driven Skills Enablement at Johnson & Johnson,” MIT CISR Working Paper No. 461, November 2023, https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/MIT_CISRwp461_JohnsonandJohnsonAIDrivenSkills_VanderMeulenTonaSomehWixomLeidner .[/foot]

To build a digital organization, you’ve got to take people’s amazing talents and create an “ and ” strategy for technology. To be relevant and future ready, you for instance need to have your commercial expertise and digital expertise. Scientific expertise and digital. You can have the best technology, but without that integrated way of thinking, it won’t transform anything.

Jim Swanson, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Johnson & Johnson

In early 2020, J&J’s Technology group began its journey of building the organization’s digital acumen with the help of AI-powered skills inference, starting with its own workforce of 4,000 technologists. By the time the group introduced skills inference to other parts of J&J in 2021, it had successfully put in place a three-step process, as illustrated in figure 1. First, it created a skills taxonomy , defining what skills would be required across the organization to reimagine business processes and develop future digital offerings. Second, the group gathered skills evidence by selecting and preparing employee data sources to analyze. And third, it conducted a passive skills assessment , for which it trained a machine learning model to measure the skills proficiencies of each employee. The result was workforce insights that guided employees’ personal development and enhanced leaders’ strategic workforce planning, both of which reduced skills gaps at J&J.[foot]J&J used skills insights only as a guide for employees’ own development; the insights did not factor into employees’ performance reviews. The organization used deidentified insights at an aggregate level to support strategic workforce planning.[/foot]

Figure 1: The Three Steps of the Skills Inference Process

Skills inference involves (1) defining a taxonomy of skills required to realize your organization’s purpose and strategic objectives, (2) gathering employee data as evidence of these skills, and (3) conducting an assessment of this evidence to quantify employees’ skill proficiency.

Defining a Skills Taxonomy

The journey of J&J’s Technology group began with figuring out what future skills J&J would need. Guided by industry benchmarks, its Digital Talent team—a team dedicated to driving the organization’s transformation with the best and most diverse talent—examined strategic plans throughout the organization to create a J&J-specific skills taxonomy. This taxonomy comprised a list of forty-one skills the team referred to as “future ready” (e.g., master data management, robotic process automation) grouped into eleven capabilities (e.g., “Scientific & Digital Health Technology”) that would be required to realize the organization’s purpose and strategic objectives.

To ensure the taxonomy’s accuracy and gain broad support for it, the Digital Talent team asked over one hundred senior leaders from across the company to validate the list. Each indicated whether the taxonomy reflected the needs of their area of business—both at that moment and in the long term—and offered their perception of the current and required state of the listed skills. Given the diversity of J&J’s operations, required proficiency levels naturally varied by functional area. For instance, employees in Innovative Medicine might need stronger capabilities in data engineering and analytics, whereas those in MedTech might need to be especially skilled in software engineering.

Additional tailoring of the taxonomy’s skill and proficiency definitions to J&J’s unique context and terminology fell to subject matter experts (SMEs), employees known for their expertise and thought leadership in a particular future-ready skill. These SMEs crafted current, precise, and yet broadly applicable definitions that novices and experts alike could understand. The result was a skills taxonomy that clearly communicated to every employee what future-ready skills were considered top priorities for J&J’s leadership. Moreover, the taxonomy specified how skills would manifest in employees’ data.

Gathering Skills Evidence

As a machine learning algorithm can only learn from provided data, the quality of chosen data sources is key to the overall skills inference process. As such, the Digital Talent team collaborated with HR data experts to identify data sources that were used across most of the organization yet also provided enough semantic data to calculate skill proficiency, ideally providing evidence for 60 to 70 percent of each employee’s skills. Four of J&J’s data sources fit these criteria: the organization’s HR information system, recruiting database, and learning management system, and one of its project management platforms.

To improve data quality, leaders encouraged employees to update the data fields in those systems that the algorithm would use to infer their skill proficiency. For instance, J&J’s HR information system allowed employees to showcase their experiences and accomplishments by sharing information about their job history, education, certifications, recognitions, goals, personal interests, and volunteering activities. If these fields were missing or incomplete, the algorithm could not infer from them. The Digital Talent team therefore also illustrated how employees could update their data most effectively by providing examples of rich statements that the algorithm could pick up on in gradations of good, better, and best quality.

For employees to be willing to provide additional data for the AI to infer from, however, they first had to trust the skills inference initiative and the intended purpose of the AI model. In accordance with J&J’s commitment to the transparent use of AI, the Digital Talent team and senior leaders communicated early and often with employees—both electronically and in person. They explained how the skills inference process could help employees identify their current skills proficiency and discover new development opportunities. They also gave them the option to opt out at any time. In addition, the Digital Talent team enhanced employee trust and engagement by establishing strict norms of acceptable data use with the help of HR data experts, multiple oversight functions at J&J, and external partners. These norms safeguarded compliance, but also respected employee privacy and reduced the risk of bias by maximizing accountability, explainability, fairness, privacy, and transparency regarding the skills inference process.

Conducting a Skills Assessment

To measure employees’ skills proficiency, the Digital Talent team relied on a proven machine learning model augmented by human input. An experienced solution provider supported the team and provided the model, which used natural language processing to generate proficiency scores for each of the forty-one future-ready skills in J&J’s taxonomy.[foot]Looking ahead, the Digital Talent team is now exploring whether generative AI can further enhance the skills inference process at J&J.[/foot] These scores ranged from zero (no skill detected) to five (thought leadership).

To improve the accuracy and reliability of the inferred scores, the Digital Talent team asked employees to self-assess their skills proficiency and managers to evaluate that of their direct reports. To avoid bias, the solution showed the proficiency scores inferred by the AI only after the participants submitted their perceptions of proficiency levels. With this input, the model generated an “agreement score” that quantified the consistency between the perceived levels and inferred scores. The goal was not to achieve perfect agreement, but rather directional accuracy: the Digital Talent team considered the inferred scores usable if they deviated by at most one point (out of five) from the perceived proficiency levels.

Limit Use Cases for Workforce Insights

Skill proficiency data has many potential uses. Yet, for employees to trust the skills inference process and not opt out of it or otherwise skew the data, it is important to limit what this data is used for. J&J therefore only used skills inference to provide more personalized career development journeys for employees, and (at an aggregate level) to support leaders’ strategic workforce planning efforts. Other use cases were not permitted by J&J’s Privacy function.

With a detailed understanding of their skills proficiency, employees could chart personalized career paths, supported by learning and development opportunities uniquely tailored to their skill proficiency levels. After the first round of skills inference, J&J saw a 20 percent uptick in participants’ voluntary learning activities. These activities not only enhanced practical expertise but also fostered habits of continuous learning and increased knowledge sharing within the organization. In subsequent years, these habits of continuous learning have only become more ingrained, as demonstrated by strong adoption of J&J Learn, the organization’s global, AI-powered learning and development ecosystem that offers training programs, growth assignments, and mentoring opportunities. By March 2024, over 90 percent of employees in J&J’s Technology group had accessed J&J Learn.

Leaders used an executive dashboard to gauge aggregated employee skills proficiency, with insights broken down by geographic region and line of business. This dashboard, displayed as a heat map, resulted in more informed hiring processes, enhanced retention efforts, and improved talent movement and advancement across J&J. The executive committee used a scorecard to track key performance indicators related to these outcomes, while each operating company and supporting function devised its own metrics based on its strategic plans and the capabilities it had to develop.

Skills Inference: People + Technology = Workforce Insights

Resolving skills gaps no longer falls to human resources or learning and development functions alone. Instead, it has become a strategic imperative, reshaping organizational capabilities based on workforce insights. AI emerged as a powerful tool in this endeavor, enabling skills inference at a scale previously unimaginable. However, the success of this process hinges on more than just advanced technologies. It continuously requires collective effort, trust, and support of stakeholders—including employees—across many organizational levels and functions. Just as digital transformation is an ongoing journey, so too is the need to regularly (re)define the skills taxonomy, gather new skills evidence, and conduct skills assessments as required skills evolve.

For those looking to embark on their own skills inference journey today, we suggest you first focus on these inherently human success factors. Begin by generating employee support with a bounded use case that embraces your workforce’s potential and signals a commitment to developing employee skills. Then gather broad input from experts to declare your desired workforce capabilities in the form of a skills taxonomy that is aligned with your purpose and strategic objectives. That way, your employees can focus their development efforts while simultaneously providing more informed input for an eventual AI to process. Start by laying this groundwork today, so that your organization may reap the rewards of AI-powered workforce insights in the future.

© 2024 MIT Center for Information Systems Research, van der Meulen, Tona, and Leidner. MIT CISR Research Briefings are published monthly to update the center’s member organizations on current research projects.

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About the Researchers

Nick van der Meulen, Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)

Olgerta Tona, Lecturer, University of Gothenburg and Academic Research Fellow, MIT CISR

Dorothy E. Leidner, Professor, University of Virginia and Academic Research Fellow, MIT CISR

Mit center for information systems research (cisr).

Founded in 1974 and grounded in MIT's tradition of combining academic knowledge and practical purpose, MIT CISR helps executives meet the challenge of leading increasingly digital and data-driven organizations. We work directly with digital leaders, executives, and boards to develop our insights. Our consortium forms a global community that comprises more than seventy-five organizations.

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MIT CISR wishes to thank all of our associate members for their support and contributions.

MIT CISR's Mission Expand

MIT CISR helps executives meet the challenge of leading increasingly digital and data-driven organizations. We provide insights on how organizations effectively realize value from approaches such as digital business transformation, data monetization, business ecosystems, and the digital workplace. Founded in 1974 and grounded in MIT’s tradition of combining academic knowledge and practical purpose, we work directly with digital leaders, executives, and boards to develop our insights. Our consortium forms a global community that comprises more than seventy-five organizations.

The NDS sets out the Government’s approach to address Australia’s most significant strategic risks based on the concept of National Defence.

The adoption of National Defence will see a Strategy of Denial become the cornerstone of Defence planning and means the Australian Defence Force (ADF) will transition to an integrated, focused force.

The IIP sets out the specific defence capabilities the Government will invest in to give effect to the NDS. It provides a generational uplift in Defence’s capabilities and reflects a coherent, logical and affordable plan to transition the ADF to an integrated, focused force.

Together, the NDS and IIP provide a blueprint to deliver an ambitious transformation of the ADF to ensure it is positioned to safeguard Australia’s security and contribute to regional peace and prosperity for decades to come.

2024 National Defence Strategy

2024 integrated investment program.

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The Office of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey

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Governor Ivey Announces Research Partners Join Team Developing New Strategic Economic Growth Plan

MONTGOMERY – Governor Kay Ivey announced today that a consulting firm and two Alabama universities have been selected to assist in the creation of a new strategic economic growth plan that will guide the state into the next decade and beyond.

The organizations will gather comprehensive data to help a small team led by Ellen McNair, secretary of the Alabama Department of Commerce, to identify the plan’s overall objectives, potential new approaches and the target industry sectors best aligned for recruitment and growth.

Collaborating on the project are:

• McKensey & Company will conduct a quantitative analysis of the target sectors and develop strategies for each of these sectors spanning the range of innovation and entrepreneurship, business retention/expansion and business attraction. The firm will also engage with industry leaders outside of Alabama for a qualitative analysis.
• Troy University’s Continuing Education and Outreach will facilitate focus groups of internal stakeholders including regional economic developers, private sector leaders and business associations.
• Alabama A&M University’s Center for Educator Preparation and Certification Services will bring an academic element to the qualitative analysis through extensive notetaking, review and the preparation of a final report based on the information gathered.

In addition, the executive committee will continue a partnership with the Hoover Institution, a leading economic policy research center led by former U.S. Secretary of State and Alabama native Condoleeza Rice, which has been analyzing many aspects of the state’s economic development practices and strategies.

“We can be proud of our solid track record in economic development, but it’s critically important for us to be prepared for what the future brings in order to capitalize on the fast-paced changes being driven by technology,” said Governor Ivey. “This new strategic plan will keep us competitive for the kind of game-changing corporate growth projects that invigorate communities and families. We must have an economic development strategy that prepares us for the 2030s today.”

The organizations will immediately begin conducting surveys, engaging in interviews with business leaders, convening focus groups and evaluating strategies to help shape the strategic plan. The firm’s experts will also examine best practices, leverage industry studies and explore enhanced levels of accountability, among other things.

“Our goal is to identify smart and future-forward strategies, backed by data, that will provide the framework for our economic development efforts well into the 2030s,” said Secretary McNair. “Our eyes are on the future, and we intend to make sure Alabama is the top choice for growth projects from companies from across the globe.”

Joining Secretary McNair on the executive committee leading development of the plan are Greg Barker of the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, Bill Poole representing Innovate Alabama and Dr. David Bronner of the Retirement Systems of Alabama.

Governor Ivey has given the team an ambitious deadline, with October 1 targeted for delivery of the completed plan.

The new plan will replace Accelerate Alabama, the state’s first-ever economic development strategic plan that was adopted in 2012 and last updated in 2017.

Since Accelerate Alabama was adopted, the state has attracted over $67 billion in new capital investment through projects involving nearly 170,000 job commitments, according to data from the Alabama Department of Commerce.

The next-generation strategic plan is envisioned to include a broader focus and new elements such as elevating human capital, spurring entrepreneurship and energizing talent attraction. It will also concentrate on quality placemaking, which includes leveraging the state’s outdoor recreation infrastructure, a key pillar of Innovate Alabama’s mission.

Governor Ivey’s push for a new strategic plan follows on the 2023 adoption of The Game Plan, a package of economic development bills that modernized Alabama’s playbook for facilitating economic growth.

“We’re taking bold steps to raise Alabama’s economy to the next level so that our citizens can take advantage of life-changing career opportunities and our state can reach new heights of prosperity,” said Governor Ivey. “The future is bringing dynamic changes, and Alabama is going to be a trailblazer.”

Provided by the Office of the Governor of Alabama | governor.alabama.gov

© 2024 Office of the Governor of Alabama

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EY Survey: AI adoption among financial services leaders universal, amid mixed signals of readiness

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One in five are not confident that their organizations are well-positioned to take advantage of the potential benefits AI might bring

Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) today released its 2023 Financial Services GenAI Survey. Nearly all (99%) of the financial services leaders surveyed reported that their organizations were deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in some manner, and all respondents said they are either already using, or planning to use, generative AI (GenAI) specifically within their organization.

Amid these universal adoption plans, just over one in five respondents said they are nervous or skeptical about the potential impact of GenAI on their organization. That same percentage also does not feel confident that their organizations are well-positioned to take advantage of the potential benefits AI might bring. Insurance is ranked highest in the nervous or skeptical category (24%), while banking and capital markets leaders had the lowest levels of skepticism (17%), followed by wealth and asset management (21%).

“While there’s a whole world of possibilities and efficiencies AI can create for financial services in areas ranging from data analysis to customer service optimization, blind optimism and hype around the technology can ultimately have a counterproductive impact on a business,” says  David Kadio-Morokro , EY Americas Financial Services Innovation Leader. “We like to take an ‘innovation intelligence’ approach to putting artificial intelligence to work — planning, education and an agile test and learn strategy for implementation are imperative for those looking to make the most of AI’s potential benefits.”

AI Outlook: Optimism Now and in the Future

The majority of respondents felt positive about AI, with more than half (55%) saying they felt supportive and optimistic about using AI in their organization. The long-term sentiment is even more optimistic, with 77% of executives viewing GenAI as an overall benefit to the financial services industry in the next 5-10 years. Leaders see a particular opportunity in customer and client experience, with 87% stating that they believe AI can bring improvements to this space.

AI Implementation: It’s Time to Get Back to Basics

Taking advantage of, and deploying, GenAI is not without its hurdles. When asked about the challenges financial organizations will face in taking advantage of GenAI, leaders ranked the following as top barriers:

• 40% said lack of proper data infrastructure and 35% lack technology infrastructure
• 36% said lack of clear commitment from leadership
• 33% said unclear governance and ethical framework

“Generative AI holds the potential to revolutionize a broad array of business functions,” says  Sameer Gupta , EY Americas Financial Services Organization Advanced Analytics Leader. “With each new wave of AI and analytic innovation, it becomes increasingly clear how important it is to have a tech stack with a solid foundation. Our role is to support financial services organizations in making sure their legacy data and technologies are unimpeachable before adding AI applications on top of existing systems.”

If organizations truly want to take advantage of AI’s benefits, a major factor in their success will be a better understanding of, and improvements in, their data infrastructure. The survey reflects this, with leaders citing the following as the top three ways AI will benefit the financial services industry:

• 46% said risk reduction from data processing
• 38% said creation of new offerings and hyper-personalized marketing
• 37% said improving data management process and accuracy

Winning the (AI) Talent Battle

“Focusing on the human role of AI implementation is just as important as technology infrastructure,” says EY Americas Financial Services Accounts Managing Partner  Michael Fox . “Our data showed that 44% of leaders cited access to skilled resources as a barrier to AI implementation, but there’s only so many already skilled professionals in existence. Part of the solution is deploying upskilling programs today that can equip your current workforce with the skills they need to help leaders and their business thrive in an increasingly AI-centric world.”

Implementing AI in financial services will undoubtedly change the way sector leaders learn, serve customers, process data and manage risk. Organizations that act now with investments in training, talent and infrastructure development while putting proper governance and controls in place will reap the benefits that AI offers their industry, continue driving the business case for investment and will likely find themselves to be a step ahead of their peers.

To find out more about EY and GenAI in Financial Services, including the recently announced unifying platform that the EY organization has created to help organizations confidently adopt AI, please visit  EY.ai .

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Methodology

Wakefield Research conducted this survey between August 15–28, 2023, among 300 Executive Directors, Managing Directors or higher at financial organizations with $2b+ in revenue. Financial organizations are defined as across the banking and capital markets, insurance, and wealth and asset management industries, with 100 responses collected from each sector.

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• university of new orleans
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• uno-chart helps craft state hazard mitigation plan

CAMPUS NEWS: APRIL 18, 2024

Hazard mitigation, uno-chart helps craft state hazard mitigation plan.

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UNO-CHART helped the state of Louisiana create a hazard mitigation plan. FEMA requires such plans for states to receive disaster aid and grants.

The University of New Orleans Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology (UNO-CHART) helped craft the Louisiana State Hazard Mitigation Plan, which was recently approved by FEMA. The plan remains in effect until March 2029.

State hazard mitigation plans are required by FEMA to qualify states to receive federal aid and grants. The Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) worked with researchers at UNO-CHART, the LSU AgCenter LaHouse Research and Education Center, and LSU to develop the plan.

UNO-CHART supported the update of the Louisiana State Hazard Mitigation Plan with a focus on the planning process; state mitigation capabilities; the overall mitigation strategy; local coordination and capacity building; mitigation in action across the state, and plan review, evaluation, and implementation. Additionally, UNO-CHART updated the Statewide Community Rating System (CRS) Strategy and plans to update the current Statewide Repetitive Loss Strategy over the next year.  

“UNO-CHART has participated in multiple mitigation planning efforts at the university, local and state level,” said Monica Teets Farris, director of UNO-CHART. “We worked on the 2019 State Mitigation Plan and were pleased to once again have the opportunity to support planning that will guide risk-informed decision-making for our state for the next five years.”

UNO-CHART is an applied social science hazards research center at the University of New Orleans that partners with and supports Louisiana communities in efforts to achieve disaster resilience with a focus on mitigation.

“Having a strong state hazard mitigation plan is critical to help Louisiana communities prepare and recover from disasters,” said Jeffrey Giering, Louisiana’s state hazard mitigation officer. “Partnerships with these universities are critical to our success and enable us to move the state’s emergency preparedness plan forward.”

The next phase of the statewide planning effort is to share information about natural hazard risk and ways to reduce this risk in Louisiana. Parishes throughout the state will be updating parish-level hazard mitigation plans and often use the Louisiana State Hazard Mitigation Plan as a baseline.

You can download the Louisiana Emergency Preparedness Guide and find other information at www.getagameplan.org .

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UNO Presents the 2024 Dr. Ivan Miestchovich Economic Outlook & Real Estate Forecast Seminar on April 9

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