Escalate Growth through Strategic Planning (Part 2)

Throughout this process, the entire strategic planning team will convene on a regular basis to provide status reports of service-line and cross-functional teamwork. This is to keep the entire team informed of work process and status, as well as to provide support and feedback on direction. Again, some Six-Sigma tools can be useful to the work of these teams. Using the definition of success from the Critical Issues Analysis, one can use the QFD or The House of Quality tools to help assess the degree to which service line recommendations are expected to contribute to this success.

By the conclusion of this phase, which could take several months, each service-line team should have identified how to achieve the overall vision by meeting or exceeding defined goals within their individual service lines or functions. Strategies, tactics, timelines and budgets should have been developed. Marketing communications, clinical, technological, human resources and other needs to achieve success should be clearly defined.

Competitive Differentiation
At this point, all initiatives should support the long-term vision. This phase is called the competitive differentiation stage, because at this point, the initiatives get prioritized by what creates the most significant competitive advantages.

Competitive differentiation is not just important for market positioning—it is important for business success. Conveying to your internal and external stakeholders how your organization is different from the competition leads to preference and loyalty—in physicians, employees and consumers. Why should physicians, nurses and other potential employees choose your hospital over your competitors? Why should patients? Why should affiliate hospitals develop transfer agreements for your hospital's higher-level clinical services? Why should the government prioritize your institution when providing certificates of need, dividing charity care reimbursements, and so on?

Differentiation is necessary on all levels of business development. Having a keen awareness of the competition, developed through the research noted above, will keep the service-line teams focused on building differentiation of services in their efforts.

At the competitive differentiation stage, all of the service-line teams and the cross-functional teams will reconvene with the overall strategic planning team. This is when big-picture vision meets reality. All service-line strategies, goals, tactics and budgets are discussed in macro terms of how the organization can accomplish the work. Due to the realities of financial requirements for the totality of work, another set of prioritization may need to occur. Given the complexities of most healthcare systems, using a tool like the Pugh-Concept Selection can help keep assessments structured and tied to the critical success factors as well as facilitate identification of hybrid or combination approaches across service lines. Timelines may need to be realigned so that you end up with a one-, two- and three-year timeline.

This phase is considered complete only when the exact vision, prioritized strategies, tactics, timelines and budgets have been approved. At the conclusion of this phase, there should be no unanswered strategies, such as: What is our suburban strategy? Is our goal to be acquired by the academic quaternary hospital? Are we developing a clinical cancer network with community hospitals? Should we invest in dual-trained neurosurgeons and "byplane" technology to launch a new cerebrovascular center? If you don't have the answers to these types of questions at this point, and you merely have an understanding that hospital leadership needs to make a decision about these issues, then you don't have a strategy—just more questions.

Trackable Benefits After the final decisions have been made and strategies, goals and critical success factors have been established, a clearly articulated message about the strategic plan's benefits to all stakeholders, and how those benefits will be tracked and reported, must be concluded before moving forward. This work should be conducted in conjunction with the marketing department. Establishing a metric for benefits and success tracking will lead to the implementation messaging strategy used in the next few stages.