Resorts Aren���t Necessary for Strategic Planning

I’m sure you’ve read of the AIG scandal by now. (Here is the Fox News story and here is the CNN story.)�� Shame is too small a word for those executives. I would love to know where their entitlement comes from. I’d squish it like a bug.

Maybe they went to the resort to do strategic planning. An off-site is good, as well as leaving behind laptops, pagers, pdas, everything that can interrupt you. Keep the tools, leave the interruptions. If your business has changed or needs to change, as I would hope it does after being rescued from bankruptcy, you do need to do strategic planning.

Here are the strategic planning steps:

1. Define your mission. (Why are you in business? Who do you serve? What benefits do you provide?)
2. Analyze the current situation
3. Define the plans for the new situation

There are lots of ways to do the analysis and planning. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a common way because it’s easy to see and easy to do wrong. Armstrong has a different approach: Seeking commitment as you specify objectives; generate strategies; evaluate strategies; monitor results. Armstrong’s approach appeals to me because it’s an iterative process, not something you do once while at a nice resort. There are other approaches also.

One of the best ways to do strategic planning is to do it constantly. No, not to take off-sites constantly, but to devote a little of your time each week to reviewing the mission, analyzing the situation, and see if you need to redefine your current plans. Of course, for that to work, you need data about sales (or the equivalent if you work in IT or a non-profit), where your projects are, and if you are truly serving your chosen customers. Then, once a month, maybe at the project portfolio evaluation meeting, you can review the strategy.

You might still need to do an offsite once a year. But not a really ritzy resort, where the booze, the golf, and spa treatments take you away from the business at hand. (Manicures and pedicures are not necessary for strategic planning.) Strategic planning is work. Hard work. Don’t treat it like it’s a day at the beach.

Full disclosure: Yes, I facilitate strategic planning meetings. They don’t look like the AIG meeting.

P.S. I forgot to point to the Armstrong paper: The Value of Formal Planning for Strategic Decisions: Review of Empirical Research

Nice Charts with Trinidad

Apache MyFaces Trinidad provides a lot of cool JSF components; a really nice one it the chart component. It offers several possibilities to visualize your structured data. Like this pie chart:

To actual provide such a nice looking chart graphic, you just need to implement an abstract class, provided by Trinidad’s API. This may sound a bit complicated… but actually it is straightforward:

public class CustomerDevelopment extends ChartModel
{
�� public List<String> getGroupLabels()
�� {
������ List<String> years = new ArrayList<String>();
������ years.add("2006");
������ years.add("2007");
������ years.add("2008");
������ years.add("2008");
������ return years;
�� }
�� public List<String> getSeriesLabels()
�� {
������ List<String> products = new ArrayList<String>();
������ products.add("Product A");
������ products.add("Product B");
������ return products;
�� }
�� public List<List<Double>> getYValues()
�� {
������ List<List<Double>> chartValues = new ArrayList<List<Double>>();
������ // iterate over the groups (years...)
������ for(int i = 0; i < getGroupLabels().size(); i++)
������ {
���������� List<Double> numbers = new ArrayList<Double>();

���������� // now, just read the series, per group (product/year)
���������� for(int j = 0; j < getSeriesLabels().size(); j++)
���������� {
�������������� // yes... some random stuff here, in the demo ...
�������������� numbers.add(10000 * Math.random());
���������� }
���������� chartValues.add(numbers);
������ }

������ return chartValues;
�� }

}

Actually, the only “tricky” part is the getYValues() method. Here you do two loops to get the correct data. When you are already in the business of providing chart data… this is somewhat familiar.

The JSPX (or Facelet) is also very simple:

<tr:chart value="#{bean.chartModel}" type="pie" />

There are actually more than 10 different types of rendering the chart, take a look at the tagdoc.

Have fun!