This strategic review workshop 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 management training workshop covers five sessions:

1) WHAT IS STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

2) THE ORGANISATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

3) STRATEGY AND COMMITMENT

4) PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY

5) EVALUATION & PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT

The course 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 assess the role of management, focussing on their responsibility for determining future direction in terms of setting vision, creating mission statements and forming strategy.

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.

A senior manager without a vision cannot be a strategist! The vision is the, perhaps idealised, 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 will provide (products/services)
• which is differentiated from others (competitors)

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 ensure goals are met.

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.

Good strategies have very clear success criteria. However, these are not in measurable form until SMART objectives have been set, (perhaps for the next year). The session will look at ways in which measures of success can be agreed and methods of assessing achievement can be established.