From the course: Strategic Planning Foundations

Planning resources

- Once you have your prioritization list and you've identified which initiatives you're going to pursue and the sequence you're going to pursue them in, it's time to allocate resources. I see organizations get this wrong all the time, because what they do is they say, well, I've got these people filling these roles on the team and this team is best set up to pursue this set of initiatives. And they let the resources drive the initiatives they pursue. And what happens when you do that is you end up with a strategy by default. You are constrained by the resources you currently have on your team and you're never going to break out and do new things because the team is only capable of so much. The right way to allocate resources is to say, here's my strategy, here's the vision, the mission, my goals, and my guiding principles for what I'm trying to achieve. Here are the strategic filters that I'm going to use to identify my highest priority initiatives. And once I have that prioritization list of what I'm going to pursue, then the question becomes one of, what's the best organization structure that I can assemble to pursue that set of initiatives? Sometimes what you find is your current organization structure is a complete mismatch for what you're trying to do. And you need a different structure with different roles and different capabilities. Once you've defined the right organization structure with the right set of capabilities to pursue that strategy, then you identify your human resource needs to fill the boxes on that correct organization chart. When you do resource planning this way, you're going to find you'll swap out talent, you may move people from one team to another, you'll identify hiring gaps that you need to fill, because you need a certain set of capabilities to deliver on this strategy. And once you've done that, then you can go from aligning big corporate goals all the way down to individual goals. And that's going to help you make sure that your teams are appropriately resourced.

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