Use 4 Questions to Evaluate your Strategy

There are a wide variety of frameworks and processes to design your strategy.  Assuming they are sound and you've followed them properly it's important to assure yourself that it will be successful in meeting your objectives.

Whether it's restructuring your online presence, launching a product or putting up a banner ad (although that's a stretch to call a strategy) you need to evaluate the quality of your strategy.  Here are some simple questions to ask yourself.

1. Does your strategy take advantage of your key resources?  Think about what you have on hand and what can easily be exploited.  This can be people, content, infrastructure or any other assets.  Does your strategy make full use of these or are they largely ignored?  
2. Can you sustain your key differentiation points?  You've made some assumptions about the competition and your abilities as your competitive advantage.  Are you going to be able to maintain that position or is it relatively easy for your competition to duplicate or exceed?  Or in other terms, once you are in market make sure that you don't lose your key differentiation points.
3. Can you obtain internal alignment?  Your strategy will most likely require participation from other key groups like customer service, sales, procurement or IT for complete implementation.  Can you line up your work against their KPI's or objectives?  Have you got buy-in from the leaders of those groups?  As you build out your launch / project plan these considerations will need to be considered.  If you ignore them you may not be fulfilling the expectation that you set with your customers.
4. Can you properly implement your strategy?  Do you have the budget, people and time to implement all aspects of it?  You do not want to implement with a half-baked solution, you know it will fail and have seen other ideas get ruined in the same way.  If you don't, figure out the roadmap that will allow you to launch in phases.

And if you have more questions that answers after going through this it's time to go back to the drawing board.