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In order to obtain best results, strategic planning projects should entail a variety of participants in order to best represent your organization. Strategic planning requires a dedication to working as a team, developing goals and strategies, and ongoing measurement. Surveys will help you.

Comprehensive surveys can make all the difference. At Woodland Strategies, a consulting firm with offices in Minneapolis, MN, Venice, FL and Phoenix, AZ, we provide multiple opportunities to use surveys, including a survey before any planning begins. This initial survey enhances ongoing internal and external cross cohort surveys as our clients move along in the strategic planning process.

A pre-planning survey provides in depth information for our clients as to their overall process. This assists all team members as we work to best address their needs and concerns.

Questions for preliminary surveys may include;

• What are the biggest challenges that you are facing?
• What is working?
• Where do you want to be in one, two and three years?
• Is there internal alignment on this?
• What about the current political, environmental, economic and technical climates – How will these factors affect your organization?

Be sure that you are using current information to inform your questionnaires.

At Woodland Strategies our surveys are characterized by a number of qualities.

• Our client survey(s) are not be overwhelmingly long, nor lofty in their language.
• Qualitive and quantitative questions are key.
• Our surveys avoid sentence structure that yield “Yes” or “No” answers.
• We eliminate leading questions that lead to unreliable data.
• And, we use data from preliminary research to be sure that clients are using current information to inform their additional cross cohort questionnaires.

Ineffective strategic plans may result from incorrect expectations about the future, poor assessments of an organization’s abilities, dysfunctional team dynamics, and excessive and irrelevant information. Implementation of any plan should be based on a sound and solid foundation, and include regular measurement of progress, and updates, accordingly. Having comprehensive surveys, including preliminary surveys, as a part of your project will provide you with a more complete and more comprehensive final product.

Having a well-constructed strategic plan can help any organization embrace and communicate their mission, momentum and direction for the future (Bryson, 2011). A well-done strategic plan is a valid and reliable tool used to help improve a company’s alignment with their goals to create buy in to implement desired change (McKinsey, 2006). Strategic planning is an excellent way to assess a shared vision and the major steps need to move any organization in an intended direction. Get started today!

Visit Woodland Strategies to engage in your next steps for ongoing success.