Strategic Planning
Engaging Viprotel in your Strategic planning will assist you in bringing multiple inter-related strands together into one cohesive, prioritised plan. Viprotel can bring clarity and additional original thinking to the table, supplementing current views as necessary with alternative approaches.
Often organisations have multiple projects on at one time, utilising the same scarce resources several times over on different projects. Some organisations today still struggle with choosing "the right project" and often embark on simultaneous developments without having a clear, decisive, end goal.
Why does one product launch work and yet another is still struggling to make its mark? Were all the factors considered in the longer term, including the market, technology, social impacts and political changes? Will it take 18-24 months to bring a product to market and will that market have changed in the meantime?
It is important to bring impartiality into a portfolio decision making process and also to understand the ultimate end goal of the organisation and the steps along the way that need to be taken to get there. To be aware from the outset what factors may be encountered on the journey and how these may affect the journey is key. More importantly to identify what mitigating factors and contingency plans need to be put in place to maximise the chance of success is key. Ultimately, to make hard choices not to do something (because the risks are too great and the financial returns can only be quantified in high risk terms) is as important a decision to be made, as the decision to invest.
Viprotel will assist your Product and Market Strategic Development on 3 levels.
Firstly it will work with your teams to build a longer term 3-5 year Strategic Product and Marketing plan, engaging and interlocking with corporate strategic plans, where these are already clearly defined and communicated or we will seek to proffer our services to help create such a corporate plan. Viprotel will endeavour to bring in external 3rd party subject matter expertise as required to assist in the plan formulation. The product and marketing strategic plan will consider market or technology changes; it will look at portfolio strengths and weaknesses and it will consider potential changes in the political and social market place. It will look at how key products or services within the product portfolio may evolve individually and suggest courses of actions for the whole portfolio and also for individual key products or services within the portfolio.
Secondly, it will focus on what needs to be achieved over the next 12-18 months and work with your teams to pull together Product Development Roadmaps. It will look in more granular detail as to how the portfolio of products are positioned on the lifecycle management curve and seek to have clearly stated for each key product or product area what are the key development goals, what is the plan maximise the return on historic investments and for products falling into the twilight zone, what are the end of life strategies being considered e.g. what are the plans for product withdrawal and what are the product migration options proposed. In all cases, the change on the bottom line and the expected impact with the customer and the market needs to be clearly stated.
Lastly, it will focus on the more immediate horizon, what are the planned Marketing Campaign and Activities planned to promote and underpin both the long term strategy and the mid term product development roadmap. Viprotel has assisted client in building campaign calendars coupled with Return on Marketing (RoM) models that demonstrate the expected value of business to be generated from certain marketing activities. Several factors, such as revenue, margin, churn, price, pipeline generation should be considered in marketing led campaigns which require a certain level of marketing spend. Marketing campaign investments can and should be treated with similar business case justifications as product investments.
It is Viprotel's aim to bring more cohesive cross departmental decision making to an organisations product and marketing functions. Viprotel believes it is imperative that have a cohesive, cross functional approach, with well laid out product and project plans.
If you wish to discuss how Viprotel's Strategic Planning service can enhance your strategy, click here.
