The 5 Rules you Must Know Before Writing a Strategic Action Plan

Executing an action plan that helps solve a problem will lead you to achieving your goal. Using this 5-step strategic action plan will keep your plan organized and focused on fixing your problems.

The 5 Rules of a Strategic Action Plan

A strategic action plan for an apartment property should contain five basis elements. These elements are a mission statement, objectives, strategies, tactical plan, and follow-up reviews. Having these basic elements in an action plan, allows for a focused and targeted implementation of the plan.

1.  Mission Statement: Identity’s the purpose of the mission. This is the statement that best describes why your property will exist, its basic purpose.

2.  Objective: Without an objective, the organization is like a ship without a rudder, going around in circles. It’s like a prison escapee who has nowhere to go.

Developing and communicating an objective, a unified sense of direction to which all members of the property can relate, is probably the most important concept in management for top-level consideration, and yet it is frequently overlooked.

Unless the property, its people and management have an objective, proper identity, a philosophy of what they are in business for (and some plans to achieve these objectives), then there is not a unified direction that management can use to relate to day-to-day decisions.

Objectives are general statements about what needs to be accomplished to meet the purpose, or mission, and addresses the major issues facing the property.

3.  Strategies: The current methods of developing strategies have two fundamental problems that severely limit the likelihood of good decisions coming out of the process.

The first problem is that strategic planning requires reasonably accurate long-term forecasts, and yet such forecasts are almost always impossible to produce.

The second problem is that most strategic plans are, in practice, not much more than financial hopes filled with “nice” numbers. Usually they are quantitative extrapolations of the past.

Instead, they should center on pinpointing the strong and weak parts of the property and spelling out what actions are to be taken to eliminate weakness and to build on strength.

With troubled properties, particular caution must be exercised to ensure that the selected strategies are appropriate in light of the limited resources available.

4.  Tactical Plans: The fourth element in a strategic action plan is to figure out “how to get from here to there.” This requires tactical plans. These plans are specific actions that are implemented to carry out a strategy.

For example, if a strategy was developed to reposition the property toward families, then some tactical plans might be to add a playground to the property, target the marketing toward this demographic, or create an after school program for the kids.

Implementing these three tactical plans will carry out the strategy of repositioning the property toward families.

5. Follow-up reviews: A successful plan just doesn’t happen; it must be continually reviewed and altered along the way making changes as the need arises. Any changes made are done to keep the plan in line with its objectives set forth in the fourth element.

By targeting your strategies at fixing the problem causing the sickness, you will be able to limit your exposure to continued problems. Make sure your strategic action plan includes these 5 essential rules so that you can build a solid foundation from which to achieve success.