The Business Strategy Audit (Business)

A company self-appraisal to analyse the effectiveness of your business strategy and your strategy-making process.

It fails in some areas – which ones? And why? How good is your strategy-making process at gathering information and opinions, and at delivering strategies that win support and deliver growth?

This self-assessment audit comes in three parts:

• First, a 3-step audit to give you a clear, objective picture of the ‘business environment’: market, competitor and financial realities. (Of course, this information is already available to you – but probably not in a form that is tailored to help you shape and realign your overall business strategy.)
• Second, a 7-step organizational assessment. This lets you audit your company’s existing strategy, viability and robustness, business processes, capabilities, resource allocation and company culture.
• Finally, it gives you the tools to integrate all these elements and a framework within which to develop an appropriate and flexible strategy for the future.

Run this audit regularly to plot how well your strategy is aligned with changing company needs. Check the targeting of resources against company capabilities and capacity – and identify any potential mis-match. Most important, use the audit to improve the way you develop new strategies.

Every company should use this audit as an essential first-step in its strategy-making process. The results will focus any strategy meeting or strategic planning group on the key issues that need to be addressed.

The audit includes a detailed guide to the audit process:

• How to set-up and staff the audit team
• How to create an audit project plan and lay the groundwork
• How to gather, analyse and share results
• How to write audit reports, make recommendations and deal with resistance to those recommendations.

The final section of the audit includes more than 40 pages of detailed questions and checklists – ready for use at each stage of the self-assessment audit.