Business Finance Homework Help

Post a total of 3 substantive responses. This includes your initial post and 2 replies to classmates or your faculty member.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

• Keeping in mind the aspects of planning, leading, organizing, and controlling, explain how you would evaluate the effectiveness of a strategic plan.
• What do you think is the most important piece of information to consider when determining effectiveness? Why?

Be constructive and professional.

Student 1 (SR)

The effectiveness of a strategic plan is measured by how well the set goals were reached. The more measurable a goal is set, the easier it is to measure how effective the plan that is being executed is. If the goal is not met then a closer look is needed to find out why and where the adjustments needed to be made. I think the most important piece of information to consider when determining effectiveness is how the goal will be measured in the first place. The goal and date used to measure the goal need to be specifically stated.

For example, the urgent care I work for has a goal of seeing more patients with the expectation of making more money. After noticing that the patient count increased but the money was not coming in, the manager had to go back and find out why that was so. Had the company’s goal been to bring in more HMO contracted patients (higher paying insurance patients) and not just more patients in general, the facility would be making more money. The money was spent prematurely on advertising that we accept the “lower-paying” insurance and we saw an influx in the patients but not so much in the money. The data and goal need to be specific and measurable to better measure the effectiveness of the strategy.

Student 2 (AP)

While planning, leading, organizing, and controlling are key aspects of strategic planning, they need to be monitored to ensure that you aren’t just spinning your wheels. I was part of a team that was working on a big project and we used a chart to graph our progress. It was similar to the thermometer charts that are used to measure progress. This gave us a visual that we could quickly read and understand to see what stages were completed and the work that was left to do. Each individual was given a task to take on and we would meet every 2 weeks to check progress and see if there were any speed bumps that slowed us down. At that point, we would figure out how to overcome the bump in the road in order to progress to the next goal. They’re just about always needs to be a backup plan just in case something goes awry. In our case, we had our regular jobs to do on top of working on this project, so sometimes we were unable to make the progress that we had planned to. We made it a point to have a couple of conference calls a week, just to check on everyone and see if another team member needed any help. That was our back up plan; help each other. In the end, we were able to finish our project ahead of our goal date, which was pretty cool. I think that the most important part of determining the effectiveness of any job is having a way to monitor your progress. You can’t just give someone an objective without any direction. That would work out about as well as telling your dog to go cook dinner; it ain’t gonna work.