With many urgent and important tasks on their to-do lists, practice owners and managers often struggle to prioritise strategic planning. However, time focussed on your business strategy and goal development is an essential investment in the future of your practice.
Strategic planning is a vehicle for growing and optimising your business. When it’s consistently pushed back, progress towards and achievement of your longer-term goals will stagnate.
Set your dates
Committing designated time for your planning sessions will make sure they happen.
Choose a time when everyone’s fresh and motivated so the ideas flow – for example, early in the week after a long weekend, early in the year or after planned leave.
Plan at least 2 sessions, with a week in between, allowing time for consideration and generating more ideas. At your second meeting, you can refine and flesh out your goals and the actions you’ll take to achieve them.
Give everyone involved advance notice of their role in the sessions. This allows them to reflect and come prepared.
Decide what you want to achieve from your strategic planning
Many clients talk about how previous strategic planning sessions have been energising and exciting. However, the document created ended up in a ‘drawer’ gathering dust. Consequently, the goals weren’t achieved or not as envisioned.
Deciding now that your planning process will also include mapping out the who, what, when, where and how, plus allocating time for this action planning to happen, will help your goals to become a reality this time around.
You can also use your strategic planning sessions to build momentum to launch your team into the coming months with fresh perspectives and drive high motivation for what will be achieved!
Points to consider before your strategy sessions
If you’re unsure where to start planning your strategy sessions, we suggest you begin by broadly reflecting on where your business is currently, how this is different from where you thought it would be now, and where you’d like it to be.
Then, determine the following:
Which stakeholders will you bring in to contribute ideas/suggestions?
What do you want to know from them? Maybe how they think things are going in the practice? What are their/your patients’ needs? Where there’s room for improvement in the day-to-day? Opportunities for growth or expansion?
What’s the best way to gather their input? Have a chat? An email survey? An anonymous survey using a program like SurveyMonkey?
Considering your planning session dates, when will you capture their input?
Will you source someone outside your business to help gather these inputs and facilitate the sessions? Alternatively, will you or a team member be the facilitator and keep the sessions outcome focused?
Don’t overlook the value your practice manager can bring
Identifying the right team members to help generate ideas and action them moving forward will support your goals coming to fruition.
Your practice manager (PM) is a key person to share your short and long-term plans with. Armed with this information, they can action, drive and manage what’s needed, plus help implement changes with stakeholders like patients and team members. They also bring a particular perspective on your practice and can identify factors and opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.
Part of your PM’s role is to manage business development and steer the ship forward whilst clinicians focus on patient care. So, getting them involved at every stage of your strategic planning process makes a lot of sense.
We’re here to help
At Augmentum, one of our key areas of work with healthcare business practice owners and decision-makers is their Strategic Planning – gathering valuable inputs, facilitating and driving the planning sessions, and ensuring an achievable Action Plan is developed.
We’re also here to assist if you don’t have a team member with whom you can share the responsibility of putting your strategic project into action. We’re here to innovate, help action your plans and make your practice successful.
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in many crucial areas, in addition to strategy development and action planning, including building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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