The general aim of this strategic review training course is to provide a practical foundation in strategic management theory, knowledge and how it might be applied within the participants organisation.

This organisational change course does not set out to develop all the required skills in detail, instead it provides a basis for examining strategic management skills, for recognising their relevance and practising them in a simulated environment.

The strategic review workshop is briefly described as follows:

1) WHAT IS STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

The session will examine what is meant by strategic review and management by considering a range of management activities, identifying the differences between them and attributing them to strategic or operational management.

We will critically assess the role of senior management within organisations, focussing on their responsibility for determining future direction in terms of setting vision, creating mission statements and converting into strategy.

2) THE ORGANISATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

A key task for strategic managers is to shape the internal environment to respond to the future demands of the external environment. A consideration of these factors is the starting point for the development of an organisation strategy. The external environment includes the trends and changing demands and needs of customers, competitors, collaborators and suppliers (STEEP).

The internal environment includes an examination of strengths and weaknesses (SWOT), CSF's, systems, processes and associated driving and restraining forces.

3) STRATEGY AND COMMITMENT

Amanager without a vision cannot be a strategist! The vision is the view of what the future will be like for the organisation. It creates the drive, energy, and organisational cohesion. But it needs expressing in a form which can be easily communicated, and in a way which describes the direction the organisation is going in. The mission, therefore, should cover:

• what the organisation is (aspirations)
• who the organisation serves (customers)
• who wants what when (needs/expectations)
• what the organisation provides (products/services)
• which is differentiated from others (competitors)

4) PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY

Planning here does not refer to detailed activity based techniques. Rather it is the high level process of setting goals, securing physical and human resources to meet the goals and monitoring performance to met them.

This will necessitate some understanding of process management, competence requirements analysis, how to match competence to capability, and result gap to HR development and succession planning.

5) EVALUATION & PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT

A strategic review outcome must be to get good strategies that have clear success criteria. However these are not in measurable form until SMART objectives have been set. The session will look at ways in which measures of success can be agreed and methods of assessing achievement can be established.