ePSP Planning Model

Expected Benefits and Takeaways of the ePSP Model

• Gain a better understanding of the big picture of strategic decision-making
• Provides a viable and effective planning model for your organization
• Learn how to think strategically about your business in an orderly way
• Forces you to think about competitive advantage
• Ensures you include market segments and customers
• Learn how to integrate the strategy and the tactics
• Generate challenging and realistic actions
• Bolster your organization’s capability to deal with upcoming change drivers
• Create value for your organization

Part 1 – The strategic portion of the plan, the strategic framework, is developed to set the direction for the organization or business unit. It starts with the articulation of a Vision and Mission, and then works sequentially through a disciplined process that includes the creation and discussion of alternative business scenarios and their implications, strategic performance targets to measure organizational performance and results, critical success factors (CSFs) to focus resources and effort on the most important priorities, a customer and business review, the identification of gaps standing in the way of achieving the CSFs, and brainstorming to identify some strategic opportunities that will help to close the gaps.

Part 2 – The tactical portion is the plan, in which specific strategic initiatives are identified that will help drive the organization to achieve its strategic aspirations by closing the gaps, delivering on the CSFs, achieving the business targets identified as Strategic Performance Indicators, and advancing towards the mission and vision.

The tactical portion of the plan is developed to include a strategic objective for each CSF, identify current and new activities to close the gaps, identify unproductive work to stop doing as a means to create more capacity to do the right things, and identify a few key measures to track performance improvements for each CSF.

An important aspect of this process is how the strategic elements are directly linked to practical activities which result in an integrated plan. This drill down process ensures that the plan is dynamic and focused on those elements that will generate impact for your organization. This process is time-efficient and with proper preparation, participation, cooperation, and facilitation, can be completed quickly (pre-planning through to output) thus minimizing the so-called planning pain experienced by most planning exercises.