January 16, 2025 | By David M. Wagner

You’ve consulted with all your stakeholders.

You’ve documented your organization’s vision – both your core identity and where you hope to be in the future.

You’ve identified goals. Initiatives. Actions. Measurements.

…Now what?

If your team doesn’t regularly manage complex, long-term projects, that question may seem daunting.

How do you keep up your momentum? Who is going to step up to take action? What do you even prioritize first?

Developing your strategy turns out to be just the first step.

Now you have to organize your team to put the plan into action.

Separate Planning from Doing

Challenge #1: help your team focus on planning.

When I facilitate planning workshops, one of my most important tasks is to channel participants’ energy away from brainstorming solutions and toward planning.

Here’s an example: a common strategic goal is increasing stakeholder engagement.

The groups I work with are often enthusiastic about offering suggestions - new outreach activities, roles, and so on.

I make sure to catalog those ideas…and then remind the team that exploring options is just one step.

They may need to first understand how stakeholders want to be engaged. And once they identify some options, they’ll need to pick one or more and implement them.

Encourage your team to not only brainstorm solutions, but to also consider all the steps in researching, choosing, and implementing those solutions.

Record Commitments

Action follows accountability.

And accountability is aided by unambiguous assignments (i.e., “David will schedule a meeting” rather than “we should have another meeting”) and a visible way to track progress.

Questions to decide as a team:

• How will you coordinate your work?

• How will we decide what tasks are most important?

• What tools will you use to track and report progress on tasks?

• How often will you meet to review progress and resolve challenges?

• Who will schedule meetings, track action items, etc.?

If this level of coordination is new to your team, pick a small, manageable initiative to start. Use that project to build familiarity with tools and processes that you can reuse on more complex efforts.

Plan to Adjust

Keeping your plans static is not a realistic option.

Anticipate that something will need to change. More steps will be required than planned. Higher priorities will pop up. You’ll identify a better approach. Your plan won’t produce the hoped-for results.

It’s useful to consider ahead of time:

• How will you know if you’re making progress?

• How often will you review and update your plans?

• How will you communicate changes to the plan to everyone?

Establishing a process for keeping your plan current will help keep your momentum going.

The work of change does not stop at strategy. By devoting time to making and adjusting plans, and using systems to track commitments and progress, you will develop the capacity to turn your strategy into action.

Building project management capacity is a core benefit of having me facilitate your strategic planning process. Set a free consult to learn more.