Strategic Planning for Credit Unions - Internal Strategic Opportunities

When considering opportunities in strategic planning, many managers in credit unions will focus on market based opportunities. These are opportunities where the benefit is derived based upon the reaction of the marketplace to whatever you do. New SEGs, new membership, new geography, and new products all fall into this category.

Internal strategic opportunities can be just as rewarding, for they help us to think about how we excel as an organization. Here are a few of the most commonly beneficial internal ooportunities:

-Improve hiring, training and retention of employees
-Improve our IT to increase information availability, reduce cost, or improve service
-Renovate a branch
-Change compensation to motivate employees
-Improve out website or other marketing capability
-Merge with another credit union
-Process improvements to increase speed, reduce cost, or improve member satisfaction

There are countless others, but all of these opportunities have, at their core, one of three strategic benefits:

1. Reduce cost
2. Improve member satisfaction
3. Increase membership

The interesting thing about the internal opportunities is that they tackle these three worthy benefits indirectly - that is, by making your credit union better able to reduce costs, satisfy members or increase membership. While internal opportunities often seem to take longer to generate benefits, they almost always provide longer lasting, more stable benefit to your credit union.

One of the pitfalls of internal opportunities like these is that many credit unions will do the first part of the opportunity - change processes, for example - without taking steps to assure the benefit. This is dangerous, because it's often just as much work as doing it properly - after all, you are changing your processes - and employees will feel they have done their jobs well, even though they didn't really realize the benefit. This is a really important point for later on, when you are setting objectives. When you set out on a strategic project, always make sure your employees know (A) what you are doing and (B) what benefit you want from it. In my experience, if you only tell employees what you are doing, you have no business expecting any benefit, outside of completing the action.

As an example of this, I've seen countless organizations spend lots of time and money changing their computer system. Many of them treated installation of the new system as the objective. The successful ones inevitably reminded themselves over and over that the real objective was better information, reduced cost, or improved member satisfaction. This helped them avoid just "going through the motions" and really focus on getting the benefit out of their strategy implementation. Make sure your internal opportunities remain tied to their real benefits, and you can greatly improve your own strategy implementation.