TibetanTailor

“How does UX fit into the strategic planning process?”

Strategic planning is planning for survival, even propsering. It is not leaving success to chance.

A straightforward view of Strategic Planning (at the business unit level) has 5 steps:
1 Mission & Objectives
2 Environmental Scanning
3 Strategy Formation
4 Strategy Implementation
5 Evaluation & Control

1 Mission & Objectives.
In the first step, the “UX Value Mandala” value of “See the Same” can help with finding ways of describing the company’s business vision. These visionary goals can be communicated in a customer centered way using many of the rendering methods of UX, such as story-boards, sceanrios, & personas. In addition, the “Mesure the Impact” UX Value means that the objective the business chooses here needs to be reflected in the online measurements and metrics.

2 Environmental Scanning
In the second step, the UX values of “Know the Small” and “Know the Large” can ehlp with a Michael Porter five forces evaluation on customers, both current customers in “Know the Small” and future customer and your competitions customers (conquests for you) in “Know the Large.” In addition, if a PEST analysis is done, then when you are looking at the social and technological factors you should involve UX team members and ask for their library of whitepapers. A good UX team that is living the value of “Know the Large,” will mean that they have a nice library of short whitepapers in which they have been continuely evaluating changes in the internet technologies and social media and how it might affect the business.

3 Strategy Formation.
In the third step, I don’t think there is much help that UX can add.

4 Strategy Implementatin
In the fourth step, I don’t think there i smuch help that UX can add.

5 Evaluation & Control
In the fifth step, the UX value of “Measure the Impact” can be a big help. If the same metrics the business chooses for overall success are the same ones that are being monitored online (which can give minute by minute feedback) is allows for better alignment and perhaps even act as an early warning system. Another help that UX might bring is to design a dashboard that would facilitate the monitoring and tracking of the actual performance versus the performance standards.

References
UX Value Mandala

Tags: planning, strategic planning, strategy, user experience, UX

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.