Specialized Strategic Planning Software

It’s costing you money to stick with the status quo. 

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, 67 percent of well-formulated strategic plans fail. Unfortunately, there’s a correlation between organizations that don’t achieve their goals and the number of companies that still use Excel or another spreadsheet to develop, implement, track and monitor their strategic plans. 

If your credit union is part of this group still using Excel, you’re not alone. According to The Planning Survey done by BARC Research, Excel is still the most widely used software for planning. However, of the 86 percent of organizations in the world that use Excel for planning, well over half of those users are not satisfied with the software, and only a quarter of users would recommend it to others. Why continue to use a tool you know doesn’t work, but still expect better results next year?

The Need for a Better Solution
There is a better way. The introduction of specialized planning software solutions has changed the game for organizations who have been quick enough to adapt.

“The specialized plan monitoring software we use now, AchieveIt, has helped us bring focus to all the initiatives we always have going on,” says CUES member Karen Church, CEO of $554 million ELGA Credit Union, Burton, Mich. “Now, we’re able to sit in a board room together and look in the same spot to see where we’re on and off target for every project, from branch openings to software implementations to general planning and beyond. We’ve finally been able to stop chasing updates and spending time putting data in spreadsheets by using automated email reminders. AchieveIt brings simplicity to the complex world of credit unions.”

More than half (53 percent) of businesses using solutions specifically built for planning experienced better quality of results than they had the prior year, whereas only 5 percent of Excel users improved their results, according to the BARC study. If your goals are to improve market expansion and retention, deepen member relations and cross sell or maintain financial health—and you’re part of the 95 percent of organizations still using Excel to monitor unsuccessful execution of your strategic plans—there’s money and time on the table that you can allocate more effectively.  

Dangers of the Status Quo

Successful credit unions know that Excel isn’t the best tool for ensuring the tracking of strategic plan progress, but many continue to choose to deal with these pains anyway. 

• You have bad data: Spreadsheets aren’t able to integrate with customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning systems, and without a common central database you’re leaving a lot of data open to human error. Outside of dealing with version control, your data isn’t real-time, doesn’t have any real context, and nine out of 10 Excel spreadsheets have some calculation mistake, according to Marketwatch.com. When data integrity is compromised, so is your decision-making ability.
• Your employees have limited access: Most credit unions are guilty of having one plan-monitoring spreadsheet saved in multiple versions on a shared drive—or worse, on multiple hard drives. Because of the inherent complexity of the document, oftentimes this will make people shy away from ever checking it, further reducing the visibility and overall focus on your strategic plan. 
• You have an Excel guru: One person, and only one, knows how all the formulas work on your plan-tracking spreadsheet. What’s your plan for turnover? Is that person actually doing the job you hired them to do, or are they in a constant state of updating? And if you don’t have an Excel guru, how are you ensuring your uniformity in reporting? Who’s checking for data accuracy? 
• You’re unable to see the big picture: Credit unions that use Excel to track and monitor their plans can have hundreds of tabs in one complicated spreadsheet that still doesn’t track everything they need. And yet, the spreadsheet also doesn’t provide a good executive dashboard view of everything at a high level. Just as important as the level of detail itself is the ability to easily view and present the data in a succinct way.
• You’re wasting time: Manual reporting wastes time. It’s more than just data entry. It’s chasing updates, compiling information from email into Excel into graphs into PowerPoint into a PDF, etc. It may take your guru so long to compile the updates, that by the time you’re reviewing data, it’s outdated and you have no chance for proactive decision-making. 

Organizational planning is in a state of evolution. With the scope of strategic planning in flux, the way we’re tracking and adapting has to bend with us and become more flexible and agile. Chasing updates and copying and pasting numbers into a spreadsheet isn’t going to cut it anymore. 

Integrated planning is the way of the future, as credit unions align individuals to strategic initiatives to show their direct impact on organizational goals. As we make way for more detailed planning, better integration with other performance management processes, shorter planning cycles, and a stronger focus on key factors and value drivers, the need to save time on the front end of data collection to be able to spend more time on analysis is increasing. 

If the only reason your credit union is continuing to use Excel is because your employees already know how to use it, it’s time to stop paying the price of being inadequate and commit to a culture of execution with specialized plan tracking software. 

Strategy execution consultant for AchieveIt, Atlanta, Joe Krause is responsible for empowering the company’s clients to execute their plans. With a consultative strategic planning background, he has worked with clients to execute more than 1,000 strategic, operational, and project plans. During his four-year tenure at AchieveIt, he has experienced, first-hand, the pitfalls organizations experience during the execution phase of their strategic planning processes and is passionate about helping teams drive toward successful business outcomes.