Strategic Management Framework Essay For CiSolve International Ltd.

Based on the above economic outlook for 2017, businesses can expect minimal or declining growth for 2017, if the economic conditions persist. As the Managing Director of the company (choose any company of your choice), the CEO has tasked you to do an in-depth assessment on the company and provide recommended strategies on how best to take the company forward in the later of 2017.

Using Thompson’s and Martin’s Strategic Management Framework and the various theoretical frameworks, your report must address the following areas:

1. Initial Assessment of the company’s vision, mission and philosophy and the relevance of it in 2017 and beyond.

2. Situation Analysis on the company: Internal environment analysis, External environment analysis and Competitor analysis.        

3. Identify the critical success factors and the gaps that exist in it.

4. Strategy Reformulation: Revised objectives, revised business level; corporate level and global strategies that addresses the findings in points.

5. Strategy Implementation: Creation of a short-medium-long implementation plan.

6. Strategy Monitoring: Indication on how the above mentioned plans will be monitored. 

Services provided by the company

CiSolve International Ltd is the IT consulting arm of a joint venture between the LEAL Group and The CIS Group, a leader in volume distribution and in the integration of ICT products and services in the Near-East and Africa CIS Group. We help organisations derive maximum value out of technology investments through business solutions. CiSolve is a multifaceted organization with a single aim – to work across partners and technologies to offer the single best solution for the customer’s ongoing business.

Our consultants specialise in the ORACLE and MICROSOFT application and technology suite of products. With an experienced talent pool, we are able to transfer our deep industry, business, and application knowledge throughout each engagement.

CiSolve serves clients in both the public and private sectors across Europe, Middle East and Africa

CiSolve has strong alliances with leading enterprise applications vendors such Oracle, Microsoft and ISVs and can provide your company with tailored IT solutions to address your immediate and future business needs.

Enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI) systems provide companies with the required tools to have the edge in today's competitive and challenging business environment.

We are committed to building effective, timely systems and delivering solutions that create clear and unparalleled business value for our clients. All our custom web and software development projects are developed using industry standard tools namely :Oracle Developer Suite 10g, Oracle Apex, Microsoft .NET Technologies, J2EE, PHP/JSP

Our years of experience, deep Enterprise Application Integration skills and passion for client service, combined with our experience in other ERP/CRM applications, equip us exceptionally well to deliver a wide range of robust integration solutions for both our software product and enterprise IT clients.

Over 50% of web access is via a smart phone – and most is via an application. Nowadays, you need to manage your mobile presence as well as your internet presence. We specialize in providing complete, end-to end development services for custom mobile applications across multiple platforms.

CiSolve offers data migration services assuring clients the comfort of using our highly skilled staff to perform some of the most sensitive of tasks. CISOLVE works with the client's staff to migrate existing applications or data to other major database vendors such as from MS SQL Server to an Oracle platform, or vice versa. These tasks include ensuring proper data type conversions and database settings as well as, among other things, implementing the appropriate database and tablespace configurations.

CiSolve’s success as a global computer technology company is founded on the fulfillment of its mission statement and vision statement. The vision statement directs the development of the business toward a desired future condition. CiSolve’s vision statement includes what the company can do for individual and organizational customers. On the other hand, a company’s mission statement presents the general strategic approach to grow the business and reach the corporate vision (“Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2012:265”). CiSolve’s mission statement specifies what the business aims to do to empower its customers. In this case, the corporate mission is strongly aligned with the vision statement.

CiSolve's Vision Statement

The company’s vision statement and mission statement emphasize empowerment that the company’s products can provide to its customers. In this case, the corporate mission statement directly reflects the corporate vision statement of CiSolve’s computer and software business.

The organizations vision statement is “to help individuals and businesses realize their full potential.” This vision statement is based on the value of the company’s computer technology and software products. CiSolve’s vision statement has the following significant components: Individuals and businesses, help realize full potential (“Darbi 2012:67”).

The first component of the vision statement partly defines CiSolve’s target market. For example, instead of selling software products to individual customers only, the company also sells its products to organizations (“Madu 2013:138”). The second component of CiSolve’s corporate vision statement shows what the business intends to do. For instance, the company aims to provide products that assist customers toward the achievement of their full potential, which is specified in the third component of the corporate vision. Thus, the company’s vision statement presents the target market, what the company’s technology products do, and what customers can achieve through such products.

CiSolve’s corporate mission is to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industry’s most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices and microelectronics (“Dermol 2012:178”). And our network of CiSolve’s solutions and services professionals translates these advanced technologies into business value for our customers (“Khalifa 2012:38”). We translate these advanced technologies into value for our customers through our professional solutions, services and consulting businesses worldwide.” This mission statement shows what CiSolve’s business does. The details cover the company’s aims and its activities on how to fulfill these aims (“Babnik et al., 2014:168”). The following points are the main components of the company’s mission statement:

To lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industry’s most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices and microelectronics.

Our network of solutions and services professionals translates these advanced technologies into business value for our customers.

We translate these advanced technologies into value for our customers through our professional solutions, services and consulting businesses.

The corporate mission statement highlights CiSolve’s leadership in the information technology industry. The details of the technologies linked to such leadership are included in the first component of the corporate statement. In the second component, CiSolve’s mission statement specifies the people involved in creating value for customers (“Coleman 2013:98”). For example, it is stated that the company’s solutions and services professionals are responsible for such value creation. On the other hand, the third component of the corporate mission presents the business activities involved in creating value for target customers. For instance, the company’s professional solutions, services and consulting businesses contain the mechanism for this value creation. This information makes CiSolve’s corporate mission statement specific in providing bases for business processes. Moreover, such information are strongly linked to the company’s corporate vision statement, which also emphasizes leadership in the industry (“Dixon et al., 2013:73”).

The Group has continued its valuable contribution to the National E-Inclusion Foundation in line with its philosophy of bringing empowerment, education and training to the more vulnerable groups in Mauritius. The project is to enhance the development of pre–primary schoolchildren in deprived regions and in areas of poverty by promoting education and training. It constitues in providing to each school in deprived regions and in areas of poverty with 2 PC per school coupled by appropriate training.

CiSolve's Mission Statement

In addition to its contribution to the Foundation, the Company has also provided financing to many NGO’s engaged in education namely Anfen and Loreto Institutes. Again the main objectives of the Group’s donations are not to finance only an NGO but mostly contribute in depth to the education and training of people. The Group strongly believes that education is the key to success.

It is one of the fastest movers in cloud computing for different enterprises. CiSolve moved to cloud computing in recently, which was designed to offer hardware and software solutions for enterprises that were willing to have their own private cloud (“Garrison, Kim and Wakefield 2012:167”). Since then the company has become one of the top reference point for enterprise cloud solutions in the cloud market. Unlike many other companies in the cloud market, the company has been offering one of the broadest range of software and services in one place.

CiSolve has a significant market reach all over the world in all of the markets it operates. Company has received many awards which has resulted in a very positive and strong brand reputation. Brand reputation significantly influences consumers’ decision to buy the product and CiSolve clearly benefits from that.

CiSolve segments its business into 4 divisions: Hardware, Software, Services and Financing. In 2012, the company was earning 35% of its income from hardware sales, where profit margins are low and future market growth is slow or negative. CiSolve has diversified from hardware to software business, which is expected to generate 50% of company’s income by 2020. This shift will result in lower impact of the negative trends in hardware market and higher profitability from sales of software and services. The company has also diversified geographically and now earns more than 60% of its income from outside the country. CiSolve heavily invests in Asia to increase the geographic diversity of its income.

CiSolve offers hardware (servers, storages), software (enterprise content, service and information management) and services (cloud, software, data centers) all related to each other, which enable the company to provide one stop solution for enterprises and integrated product for the customers.

Expensive service and software solutions

CiSolve offers expensive integrated custom solutions for enterprises that want to build reliable IT infrastructure in their companies. This often involves buying hardware, software and services from the organization at the same time, which is very costly expenditure for any size of enterprise. Such an infrastructure investment is often postponed in times of uncertainty or slowing economy growth. This weakness was evident over the last few years, when CiSolve struggled to cross sell its products and saw decreasing revenues in the same period.

CiSolve focuses on providing customized solutions for large and medium enterprises. This is a very profitable business model but captures only a small share of the market. The rest of the market is often satisfied with off-the-shelf software products and services (“Powell and DiMaggio 2012:40”). The lack of these products makes CiSolve less approachable by the rest of the market, where competitors like Oracle and SalesForce thrive.

Expand services and software divisions. CiSolve provides various services (cloud, security and infrastructure) and enterprise solutions (servers, networking and storage), which are the most profitable CiSolve’s businesses at the moment. The company should focus on growing these divisions as they promise better growth opportunities and higher profit margins (“Dutta and Kanungo 2013:39”).

Increasing demand of cloud based services. The cloud computing market is expected to grow by an average of 22% each year from 2011 to 2020. By 2020, the market is expected to reach $240 billion value. Currently, CiSolve is offering many services related with cloud computing and is well positioned to benefit from the growing market.

Cloud computing market is new and lucrative market that has a lot of growth potential. The possible profits attract many newcomers and startups and threaten to take the market share from the incumbent CiSolve.

As mentioned earlier, CiSolve sales heavily depend on the enterprises’ willingness to make huge investments into IT infrastructure, which is far from the first option during the times of slow economy growth. While this scenario is not forecasted for the whole world during 2013 and 2014, some regions, like Europe, will still struggle to grow (“Dixon et al., 2013:25”).

Critical success factors are defined as the handful of key areas where an organization must perform well on a consistent basis to achieve its mission (“Liu et al., 2014:301”). CSFs can be derived through a document review and analysis of the goals and objectives of key management personnel, as well as interviews with those individuals about their specific domain and the barriers they encounter in achieving their goals and objectives.

Mobile applications, including custom built mobile apps, actively penetrate enterprises’ everyday life. The majority of modern companies introduce mobile apps into their business process to enhance interaction with their customers and improve the internal communication. According to the Aberdeen Group research conducted in 2013 62% of the respondents have already adopted mobile software initiatives into their corporate strategy (“Fleisher and Bensoussan 2015:35”). The major reasons of growing penetration of the mobile apps are: Companies’ desire to enhance competitiveness; Business process and communication improvement; Providing employees with more mobility and freedom of movement; Satisfying unique business process and data integration requirements.

Still companies face some risks related to mobile software implementation. For example, one of the major issues is security of the corporate mobile applications since mobile and tablet devices are easily lost or stolen and crucial data may become revealed. Security protocols implementation has to be exquisite to provide safe work within the internal company networks and the Internet (“Speculand 2014:98”).

Setting Organizations’ objectives again - The key component of any strategy statement is to set the long-term objectives of the organization. It is known that strategy is generally a medium for realization of organizational objectives. Objectives stress the state of being there whereas Strategy stresses upon the process of reaching there. Strategy includes both the fixation of objectives as well the medium to be used to realize those objectives. Thus, strategy is a wider term which believes in the manner of deployment of resources so as to achieve the objectives.

While fixing the organizational objectives, it is essential that the factors which influence the selection of objectives must be analyzed before the selection of objectives. Once the objectives and the factors influencing strategic decisions have been determined, it is easy to take strategic decisions (Fleisher and Bensoussan 2015:165).

Evaluating the Organizational Environment - The next step is to evaluate the general economic and industrial environment in which the organization operates. This includes a review of the organizations competitive position. It is essential to conduct a qualitative and quantitative review of an organizations existing product line. The purpose of such a review is to make sure that the factors important for competitive success in the market can be discovered so that the management can identify their own strengths and weaknesses as well as their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

After identifying its strengths and weaknesses, an organization must keep a track of competitors’ moves and actions so as to discover probable opportunities of threats to its market or supply sources.

Setting Quantitative Targets - In this step, an organization must practically fix the quantitative target values for some of the organizational objectives. The idea behind this is to compare with long term customers, so as to evaluate the contribution that might be made by various product zones or operating departments.

Aiming in context with the divisional plans - In this step, the contributions made by each department or division or product category within the organization is identified and accordingly strategic planning is done for each sub-unit. This requires a careful analysis of macroeconomic trends.

Performance Analysis - Performance analysis includes discovering and analyzing the gap between the planned or desired performance. A critical evaluation of the organizations past performance, present condition and the desired future conditions must be done by the organization. This critical evaluation identifies the degree of gap that persists between the actual reality and the long-term aspirations of the organization (“Weekley and Ployhart 2013:168”). An attempt is made by the organization to estimate its probable future condition if the current trends persist.

Choice of Strategy - This is the ultimate step in Strategy Formulation. The best course of action is actually chosen after considering organizational goals, organizational strengths, potential and limitations as well as the external opportunities.

Enterprises for the most part consider mobile applications to be business tools and, thus, are frequently facing difficulties with integrating an app with corporate data and processes. The important thing in successful mobile app implementation is adherence to a systematic approach to the development process which, among other steps, includes: product definition, effective management, use of proper development tools and technologies, constant quality assurance, resolving security and compliance issues, customer support throughout the whole period of the app’s life.

Building a useful and reliable enterprise mobile application is not an easy task, but it is important to remember that, except for technological and security limitations, there are no strict rules in the app development process. Many best practices are available for the developers to refer to, and in the next few paragraphs we will mention just some of those related to the list above.

The first step in effective mobile apps development is defining its main goals and requirements, identifying the target audience (customers, employees, partners, etc.). You need to connect app functionality with business context to make users (e.g. your employees) more productive, simplify and speed up their work, improve and smoothen the overall work process. It’s also necessary to decide whether you purchase an off-the-shelf application and integrate it into your business process or you need a custom solution for your specific business needs created by your internal IT team or outsourced to your partner.

In the process of application development it’s necessary to take into consideration multiple mobile devices with their OS versions and specific environments, numerous models of smartphones and tablets, etc. It is vital to thoroughly integrate the application into the business process and keep it synchronized with the latest business data available. Another important issue is the effective application management that includes monitoring, continuous reporting and analysis of app usage and the development process itself.

Mobile app QA strategy includes the following key elements: multiple devices coverage, OS version control, functional, non-functional and automated testing. Conducting market research will help you better determine the markets your application is designed for and concentrate on the major technical features/use cases (“Fleisherv and Bensoussan 2015:56”). It’s also important to reveal possible security threats and communicate them to the development team (“Blankestijn 2013:201”). At all stages of app development the testing goals should be clearly transferred to QA engineers and different testing mechanism utilized (functional testing tools). Non-functional testing includes analyzing app performance in different locations, with multiple users, determining memory and power consumption and network performance. Automated testing allows to repeat test procedure consistently and will be effective during the development process and for regression testing.

Below are the 5 steps to successful strategy implementation.

1. Align your initiatives

A key road to failed implementation is when we create a new strategy but then continue to do the same things of old.  A new strategy means new priorities and new activities across the organization (“DeFillippi and Roser 2014:77”). Every activity (other than the most functional) must be reviewed against its relevance to the new strategy.

A good way of doing this is to create a strategic value measurement tool for existing and new initiatives. Initiatives should be analysed against their strategic value and the impact to the organization (“Serafeim 2014:365”).

Kaplan & Norton developed a scorecard based on the following criteria: Strategic Relevance/Benefit (weighted 50%), Resource Demands (30%) and Risks (20%).

Measuring your initiatives against a scorecard will help highlight the priorities and ensure the right initiatives are adopted for delivery.

2. Align budgets & performance

Ideally your capital budgets are decentralised, so each division can both allocate and manage the budgets to deliver the division’s strategic initiatives. Norton and Kaplan in their recent book ‘The Execution Premium’ recommend cross functional strategic initiatives be allocated specific budget (STRATEX) alongside capital (CAPEX) and operating (OPEX) budgets. This protects strategic expenditure from being re-allocated to short-term requirements of OPEX whilst subjecting strategic initiatives to a rigorous review (eg. forecasted revenue growth and productivity) much like is done for CAPEX.

Organisational performance should be closely aligned to strategy.  Performance measures should be placed against strategic goals across the organisation and each division and staff member. All staff will have job functions that will impact on strategy (“Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2012:212”). Most staff will have impact across a series of strategic goals (eg. financial, customer service, product). Ensure employees are aware of their role and influence on strategy delivery and performance. This is also important to employee engagement.  

Likewise performance incentives should be directly linked to performance against strategy. They should include a combination of individual, team and corporate performance measures that ensure staff recognise their direct and indirect impact on strategy performance.

3. Structure follows strategy

A transformational strategy may require a transformation to structure. Does the structure of your organisation allow strategy to cascade across and down the organisation in a way that meaningfully and efficiently delivers the strategy?

Organisations that try and force a new strategy into an out-dated structure will find their strategy implementation eventually reaches a deadlock.

4. Engaging Staff

The key reason strategy execution fails is because the organisation doesn’t get behind it. If you’re staff and critical stakeholders don’t understand the strategy and fail to engage, then the strategy has failed (“Dix, Phillips and Braide 2012:167”).

The importance of this step cannot be understated. If you’re staff are not delivering the strategy, then the strategy has failed.

So how do we engage staff?

Prepare:  Strategy involves change. Change is difficult and human tendency is to resist it. So not matter how enlightened and inspiring your new strategic vision, it will come up against hurdles. Tipping Point Leadership theory (a key principle of the Blue Ocean Strategy methodology) outlines four key hurdles that executives must overcome to achieve execution. Those hurdles are cognitive, resource, motivation and political hurdles. It is important we understand each of these hurdles and develop strategies to overcome them (“Gomez and Park 2012:58”)

Include: Bring influential employees, not just executive team members into the planning process. Not only will they contribute meaningfully to strategy, they will also be critical in ensuring the organisation engages with the strategy. Furthermore, listen across the organisation during strategy formulation. Some of your best ideas will come from within your organisation, not the executive team (think 3M’s Post-It Notes)

Communicate: Ensure every staff member understands the strategic vision, the strategic themes and what their role will be in delivering the strategic vision.

And enrich the communication experience. Communicate the strategy through a combination of presentations, workshops, meetings, newsletters, intranets and updates. Continue strategy and performance updates throughout the year.

And engage them emotionally in the vision. The vision needs to give people goose bumps – a vision they believe in, that they want to invest and engage with.

Clarify: It is important that all employees are aware of expectations. How are they expected to change? What and how are they expected to deliver? Each individual must understand their functions within the strategy, the expected outcomes and how they will be measured. As mentioned above performance measures and incentives should be aligned with performance against strategic KPIs.

5. Monitor and Adapt

A strategy must be a living, breathing document. As we all know: if there’s one constant in business these days it’s change. So our strategies must be adaptable and flexible so they can respond to changes in both our internal and external environments.

Strategy meetings should be held regularly throughout the year, where initiatives and direction are assessed for performance and strategic relevance. At least once a year we should put our strategy under full review to check it against changes in our external and competitive environments as well as our internal environments.

Strategy is not just a document written by executive teams and filed in the CEO’s desk. It is a vision for the organisation, owned by the organization (“Yang 2012:09”). And to succeed the whole organisation must engage with it and live and breathe it. Strategy should inform our operations, our structure, and how we go about doing what we do. It should be the pillar against which we assess our priorities, our actions and performance.

When execution is brought into strategic planning we find that our strategy is weaved through our organisation, and it’s from here that great leaps in growth and productivity can be achieved (“Wheelen and Hunger 2017:207”).

Your organization’s monitoring strategy is a long-term plan for addressing platform performance over time, and it’s essential for getting the most benefit out of your monitoring data. Businesses that implement strong monitoring practices find it easier to resolve service disruptions.

Often overlooked are the five key components necessary to support implementation: people, resources, structure, systems, and culture. All components must be in place in order to move from creating the plan to activating the plan.

The first stage of implementing your plan is to make sure to have the right people on board. The right people include those folks with required competencies and skills that are needed to support the plan. In the months following the planning process, expand employee skills through training, recruitment, or new hires to include new competencies required by the strategic plan.

You need to have sufficient funds and enough time to support implementation.  Often, true costs are underestimated or not identified. True costs can include a realistic time commitment from staff to achieve a goal, a clear identification of expenses associated with a tactic, or unexpected cost overruns by a vendor. Additionally, employees must have enough time to implement what may be additional activities that they aren’t currently performing.

Set your structure of management and appropriate lines of authority, and have clear, open lines of communication with your employees. A plan owner and regular strategy meetings are the two easiest ways to put a structure in place. Meetings to review the progress should be scheduled monthly or quarterly, depending on the level of activity and time frame of the plan.

Both management and technology systems help track the progress of the plan and make it faster to adapt to changes. As part of the system, build milestones into the plan that must be achieved within a specific time frame. A scorecard is one tool used by many organizations that incorporates progress tracking and milestones.

Create an environment that connects employees to the organization’s mission and that makes them feel comfortable. To reinforce the importance of focusing on strategy and vision, reward success. Develop some creative positive and negative consequences for achieving or not achieving the strategy.  The rewards may be big or small, as long as they lift the strategy above the day-to-day so people make it a priority.

Implementing your plan includes several different pieces and can sometimes feel like it needs another plan of its own. But you don’t need to go to that extent. Use the steps below as your base implementation plan. Modify it to make it your own timeline and fit your organization’s culture and structure.

1. Finalize your strategic plan after obtaining input from all invested parties.
2. Align your budget to annual goals based on your financial assessment.
3. Produce the various versions of your plan for each group.
4. Establish your scorecard system for tracking and monitoring your plan.
5. Establish your performance management and reward system.
6. Roll out your plan to the whole organization.
7. Build all department annual plans around the corporate plan.
8. Set up monthly strategy meetings with established reporting to monitor your progress.
9. Set up annual strategic review dates, including new assessments and a large group meeting for an annual plan review.

Businesses looking to develop a monitoring strategy should consider the following:

Identify and include all major stakeholders in the monitoring strategy development process. This includes developers, quality assurance, IT, management, owners, and marketing (“Hollensen 2015:109”).

Establish everything that needs to be monitored within the website and mobile application, which includes things like viewing content, making a transaction, and performing a search. Determine what the most common tasks are and monitor those (“Picotti and Aebersold 2012:250”).

Discuss upcoming changes with the platforms across different teams, and devise a plan to monitor how those changes impact performance.

Set performance benchmark goals. These are also helpful in determining alert criteria.

Develop a location-based monitoring strategy to keep an eye on performance for your audiences in all important regions.

Establish whose job it is to handle each part of the monitoring and evaluation process.

Set the evaluation frequency and adjust that frequency as needed.

Continue to meet with stakeholders to review the strategy every month or two.

Agile Development = Agile Monitoring

Unfortunately, developing a monitoring strategy is unlikely to get easier: IT teams are managing more moving parts than ever, and that means there’s more to monitor. According to the survey, 54 percent of respondents consider their organization “agile.” The survey also found that code updates and infrastructure changes are becoming more frequent, shifting towards multiple updates each month instead of semi-annual patches. Development teams, then, have to keep a watchful eye on performance to keep up with updates.

A successful alert management strategy gives your organization a competitive advantage. Instead of waiting for a report, your staff is immediately notified when a problem situation or potential issue with the platform’s performance arises. According to the Big Panda survey, 78 percent of respondents said reducing alert noise, or too many unnecessary alerts, is a challenge. Alert overload makes it difficult for teams to focus on what actually matters. Only 26 percent of organizations receiving 100 or more alerts a day say they can resolve three-quarters or more of them within 24 hours.

Successful alert strategies should consider the following:

Clearly define and adjust alert thresholds for optimal use. Too few alerts, and you’ll miss your early-intervention opportunity. Too many, and everything gets lost in the clutter.

Establish criteria for alerts that actually matter, and follow typical use cases. Don’t waste time with performance test problems from obscure, outlandish usage.

Assign different types of alerts to different teams based on who can best address the issues. For example, app issues could go to the app team and work their way down to the IT team, instead of starting everything with IT and trying to assign it from there. Spend less time deliberating who should address problems (“Aceto et al. 2013:79”).

Business plans should be reviewed on a regular basis, especially if a business is expanding quickly, experiencing cash flow problems, adding new products or services or reaching into new markets. Align your review dates with the short-term and long-term goals outlined in the original business plan and conduct a comparative analysis. Depending on your business, this could be a monthly, quarterly or annual review.

If your business plan contains measurable goals, develop a tracking system to assess where you stand regularly. For example, if the plan calls for earning a certain amount of revenue per month, track revenue on a daily or weekly budget to monitor and control the process (“Brewer 2012:258”). This approach allows you to tweak the system if your numbers are far off the mark. Monitor key elements frequently. Key elements of the business plan include research on your market and competition as well as revenue projections. Each of these elements is subject to rapid change, and you should remain aware of where you stand with regard to these issues.

Business and marketing plans overlap in several ways, so reviewing both documents simultaneously on a regular basis helps you monitor and control the goals and measurements of each plan (“McDonald and Wilson 2016: 116”). If an element of one plan changes dramatically, evaluate the impact it has on the other plan. For example, if your marketing plan calls for you to launch a major media campaign, but your business plan’s revenue projections are weak, revise each to stay on track (“Czinkota and Ronkainen 2013:38”).

A business plan is not an unchangeable document. Consider it a fluid plan that can be tweaked and updated as your business changes and grows. Don’t cling to elements of your plan that are outdated or no longer useful. For example, if part of your five-year plan includes moving to a larger facility, but you find after five years that your small facility works just fine, revise and update the business plan. Continually revise your plan so that you are always looking ahead in one, three and five-year increments, basing future projections on past performance.

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