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Strategic Priorities, or objectives are critical in helping your organization prioritize and guide your work through the coming years.

Using “SMART Goals” for Setting Objectives in Your Strategic Plan. The one fulfilling attribute of being a business consultant is getting to work with a variety of non-profits and businesses throughout the world that are very unique and passionate about their cause. Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to a non-profit group from New York who are just embarking on creating a strategic plan for their organization. As a strategic planning advisor, I was attempting to guide them and let them know how important the objective setting process will be to their strategic plan. In the strategic consulting business, I see many organizations create strategic plans that are dynamic and are extremely successful. In the transition phase, they are able to execute their objectives with ease and normally have a high success rate in accomplishing their strategic planning objectives. On the other hand, I have also seen organizations struggle with their strategic plans and in some cases, these plans even sit on the shelf collecting dust. This can be for many reasons, but the one major fallacy I see is the lack of setting good clear objectives that are aligned with an organizations mission, vision and values. In the strategic planning world, there is process called "SMART Goals" that is used quite regularly by strategic planning facilitators for setting objectives. SMART is the acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timeline.

Embarking on a strategic plan can be a very daunting process as the scope of the project can be extremely complex. Now that you know you want to build a roadmap for your organization where do you start.

Some business and non-profit leaders are great strategist and have a mandate to always be thinking about strategy for their organization.

In this ever-changing business world, it’s imperative that organizations take a well-rounded approach with their strategic positioning by constantly looking at all the internal and external threats of their business. One often overlooked strategy, is using valuable feedback loops to create rich data that can be instrumental in developing a strategy for an organization.