Stay adaptable
You need to be able to make adjustments to your plan as events unfold. You will probably never abandon the core mission statement of your company, but how you serve customers might change, your markets might shift or the economy might throw you another curveball.
To build adaptability into a strategic plan, you need to build a series of red lights into your planning and review process — intersections where you are forced to stop for a moment and survey the scene in front of you.
Alvin and his leadership team do an environmental analysis every year. It’s a short-term review aimed at identifying longer-term adjustments that will be needed, and it is done while those adjustments are still long-term specks on the horizon.
“As an example, we did an environmental analysis this past spring, then in late spring, we developed the objectives for 2011, and in summer and early fall, we developed the budget based on our objectives through 2011,” he says. “Every year, you’re going through a systematic process of evaluating the environment, evaluating the objectives, establishing new objectives for the following year and allocating resources in the budgetary process to make sure those objectives are accomplished. Some of the objectives are meant to be met over a three-year period instead of a one-year period, but there are milestones that need to be met every year.
“Basically, if things change in the marketplace, we see that a strategy isn’t achieving what we intended, we make adjustments and then extend the strategic plan out by one additional year. It’s always refreshed and always looking out three years.”
Course adjustments are something with which Alvin has had some firsthand experience over the past several years, as employers began to take an in-depth look at how they were spending money.
“Employers needed products that were less costly and shifted expense to the members more rapidly than we had anticipated,” he says. “When that happened, we had to move quickly to develop more high-deductible products where the initial costs were assumed by the individual employee. That’s an example of how we’ve needed to move quickly to modify an approach.”
But it all comes back to staying close to your customers and developing processes to measure your progress and ensure that your company is accomplishing what it set out to accomplish.
“We try to listen to customers and work with them in a consultative fashion,” Alvin says. “If you develop that type of relationship, they’ll tell you what is going on. If you have that consultative relationship, they will listen to your input, and together you can develop solutions that can best serve the needs of your customers.”
How to reach: Health Alliance Plan, (313) 872-8100 or www.hap.org