Strategic Plan Evaluation and Recommendations for Hoosier Media, Inc.

This presentation evaluates the strategic plan of Hoosier Media, Inc., a media company facing challenges from social media. It outlines criteria for evaluating strategic plans, emphasizing consistency with the environment, internal consistency, resource allocation, risk assessment, and time horizons. The presentation details corrective actions for aligning operations with the strategic plan, including organizational capabilities, budgeting, support systems, incentives, and cultural alignment. It provides methods for measuring organizational performance through clear performance measures, communication, and avoiding a silo approach. The presentation also addresses measuring progress toward objectives, focusing on efficiency, quality, and accuracy. Furthermore, it specifies criteria for ensuring objectives are measurable and verifiable, including specificity, measurability, and attainability. Finally, the presentation recommends changes to reposition Hoosier Media competitively, such as rethinking the business model, focusing on niche markets, and transitioning from a content provider to a service and experience company.

Hoosier Media, Inc.: Strategic Plan
Evaluation
Student’s Name
Institution Affiliation

Introduction
Company: Hoosier Media, Inc.
 Hoosier Media Group is involved in all types of media including print,
digital, online, specialty publications and newspaper management
services. The company like all other traditional media faces
challenges due to social media.
Importance of Strategy
 Makes work of attaining goals easier
 Spurs action
 Enables the management to attain decisive impact
 Helps in identifying firm’s goals

Options for Evaluating a
Strategic Plan
Evaluation criteria should be based on the Analysis of:
 Firm’s Consistency in the Environment
 The company policies must relate to what is happening in the environment
 The company’s Consistency
 All policies (e.g product policy or pricing policy) must fit into an integrated
corporate plan
 The strategic Plan’s appropriateness given the available resources
 Money, physical facilities etc.
 Appropriate degree of risk
 Workable time horizons
 Degree of workability (Furrer, Thomas, & Goussevskaia, 2008).

Environment
Consistency
 The company’s policies must augur well with what is going on in the market.
Firm’s policies include:
 Price policies
 Product policies
 Advertising policies
 The company’s environment includes:
 customers
 The government
 Competitors
 Consistent in two ways:
 Static (Environment as it exists now)
 Dynamic (Environment conditions as they might be in a projected future)

Internal Consistency
 The policies in the strategy plan must accord with:
 Corporate goals
 Other company policies
 Consistency Between the proposed plans in the strategy and the
existing company plans and goals ensures:
 Easier implementation of the strategies
 Avoidance of future conflict between the company plans and the strategies
forcing the company into making painful strategy choices without a
fallback plan.

Strategy and Available
Resources
 Strategies are driven by the resources available to the company such as:
 Competent human resources
 Money
 Facilities
 The brand recognition
 Customer loyalty
 There are two basic considerations relating to resources and strategy:
1. Critical resources
 Most available resources
 Least available resources
2. Appropriateness of the proposed strategy in relation to the company resources

Acceptable Degree of Risk
 Every venture or activity is accompanied with varying degrees of
risks
 The degree of risk is determined by evaluating a combination of
strategy and resources.
 Considerations determining degree of risk:
 Uncertain terms of existence
 Commitment duration
 Size of the stakes
 The greater the quantities in these three considerations the greater
the degree of risk.

Appropriate Time Horizon
 Time horizon refers to the combination of:
 Goals
 Timelines
 The strategy should ensure it has put in place SMART goals
 Big companies and corporations have long timelines while smaller
firms can thrive even with short time horizons
 Longer time horizons affords the company the luxury of an array of
tactics it can pursue to reach a goal (Jain, 2013).

Is the strategy Workable
 The strategy can be said to be workable only if there are performance
evaluation criteria input in the strategy
 Most companies measure the workability of a strategic plan using
various quantitative measures focusing on a combination of:
 Strategies selected and
 The Skills applied in the execution
 One the two are positive, the strategy is considered workable

Corrective Actions to align policies
and strategic plan
 Many strategic plans are designed for implementation on an already
existing organization.
 There is a need to ensure that the company adjust its previous plans to be
in accord with new strategic policies
 Six principal administrative tasks that determine a company’s action plan
for the implementation of the strategy:
 Organization capability of implementing strategy
 Planning a budget that supports the implementation of the strategy
 Establishing support systems for the organization
 Establishing supportive incentives and rewards systems
 Aligning the strategy with the corporate culture
 Strategic leadership (Dess, Peng, & Lei, 2013).

Measuring organization
performance
 Actual performance outcomes measured against stated goals
 Performance criteria should be set using top down approach
 The strategic plan should set up performance target for:
 The whole organization
 Each and every level within the organization
 Approaches to measuring organization performance:
 Create clear performance measures
 Communicate them effectively
 Avoid “silo” approach to measurement
 Ensure you measure the right things (Patanakul, Shenhar, & Project
Management Institute, 2012).

Measuring Progress Towards stated
Objectives
 Clear objectives
 These are input in the process of preparing the strategic planning to allow the
implementers to easily measure the progress.
 Efficiency
 This is measured by analysis of cost effectiveness versus productivity
 Quality
 Measuring perception of customers over the company’s products or services
 Measure the number of complaints, speed of reply, perception of customer
about how fast the company responds to complaints.
 Accuracy
 This value is measured by comparing the expected results and the actual end
results (Jancenelle, Storrud-barnes, Iaquinto, & Buccieri, 2016).