Strategic activities are actions, projects and other activities that are designed to generate outcomes that ultimately lead to attaining objectives, goals and eventually to achieving the organisation’s vision.
As can be seen in the diagram, activities are the foundation of the strategy model which means that they are the most critical element of any strategic plan and are the elements that help translate the strategic plan into a detailed business plan.
Our Strategy development process not only identifies activities that are critical to attaining the organisation’s desired aspirations but it links individual and collective activities using a cause and effect relationships to each other and to the desired outcomes. This effectively creates a map of the strategic activities.
It is important to ensure that the activities are linked directly to attain specific outcomes or objectives. Remember, you are undertaking the activity in order to attain the outcome, not in the hope that you might achieve the outcome.
This is a crucial distinction and should be applied to every decision that you have to make while implementing an activity. For example, if you are managing a project and you have a decision to may as to which direction to take in a particular aspect of the project. In these circumstances you should always as does this action/activity lead to achieving the outcome that I am aiming for? If the answer is yes then it is the correct course of action.
It should be clear from the above that strategic activities are crucial to the development and more crucially to the implementation of an organisation’s strategic and business plans. Identifying the key activities during the strategy creation process is, therefore, crucial to the building a robust strategy as a that is built on weak or poorly defined activities is like building a house on weak foundations – it is likely to collapse at some point!
It is also important to measure the results of strategic activates in order to ensure that they are resulting in the desired outcomes. The earlier you can identify issues with activities the quicker you can take steps to correct them and get your strategy implementation back on track.
