Strategy Evaluation and Control: Completing the Strategic Loop: Part 6

In Part 5, we watched a strategy leave the boardroom and enter the real world — budgets set, structures aligned, people assigned. But a strategy that is only implemented and never inspected is a ship sailing without a logbook. Part 6 covers the phase that closes the strategic management loop: strategy evaluation and control, the discipline of checking whether the strategy is still the right strategy and whether it is producing the results it promised.

Examiners love this phase because it is where the whole framework either holds together or falls apart. The ideas below follow the standard syllabus — the evaluation questions, the three activities, the four types of strategic control, and the criteria and tools used to judge a strategy in action.

What Strategy Evaluation Actually Means

Strategy evaluation is the final phase of the strategic management process, but it is not a year-end ritual performed after everything is over. It is a continuous, running check on the strategy’s foundations, its assumptions and its results.

1. A continuous activity, not a post-mortem. Evaluation runs alongside implementation, so drift is caught while it can still be corrected cheaply.
2. A test of the strategy itself. Evaluation asks whether the chosen strategy still deserves the organization’s commitment, not merely whether work is proceeding.
3. A feedback loop for learning. Lessons from evaluation feed the next planning cycle, which is how organizations actually improve at strategy over time.
4. The managers’ dashboard. Monitoring, appraisal and feedback give leadership the evidence needed to continue, adjust or abandon course.

Three Fundamental Questions of Strategy Evaluation

Every evaluation framework, however elaborate, reduces to the questions a strategist must be able to answer honestly. The classic trio from the syllabus:

1. Are the objectives still right? Objectives set two years ago may no longer fit a market that has since changed shape.
2. Are the strategies still right? A strategy that was sound at selection can be invalidated by a competitor’s move or a new regulation.
3. Are the results coming in? Actual performance must be compared against the targets the strategy promised at approval.

The Three Activities of the Evaluation Process

The syllabus describes evaluation as three linked activities — examining the bases of strategy, measuring performance against standards, and correcting deviations. Together they form the control cycle.

1. Examine the underlying bases. Revisit the premises — growth rates, competitor behaviour, technology assumptions — and ask if reality has quietly diverged from them.
2. Measure and compare. Track actual results against planned targets using quantified standards, so comparisons are evidence rather than opinion.
3. Take corrective action. Deviations demand a response: fix the execution, reshape the strategy, or in the extreme, abandon it before more value burns.

Four Types of Strategic Control

Control at the strategic level is not one mechanism but a set of watching briefs, each guarding a different layer of risk. The four standard types appear in nearly every exam paper.

1. Premise control. Checks whether the assumptions on which the strategy was built — about markets, costs, regulation — remain valid as conditions evolve.
2. Implementation control. Reviews the big milestone decisions and resource commitments themselves, asking whether the rollout still deserves continuation.
3. Strategic surveillance. A general, all-weather watch over sources inside and outside the firm for early signals of unintended threat or opportunity.
4. Special alert control. A rapid, thorough reappraisal triggered suddenly — a hostile takeover bid, a crisis, or an abrupt political shock.

The Criteria for Judging a Strategy

When evaluators sit in judgment, they need standards. The widely taught test asks three things of a strategy: is it suitable, is it feasible, and is it acceptable?

1. Suitability. Does the strategy actually address the situation the firm faces — the rivalry, the resources, the environment identified in analysis?
2. Feasibility. Could the strategy be made to work with the skills, funds and capacity the organization realistically possesses?
3. Acceptability. Does the expected return justify the risk, and can stakeholders — shareholders, employees, regulators — live with it?

Tools and Techniques of Evaluation

Techniques turn evaluation from an abstract duty into a repeatable practice. Four appear most often in syllabi and in real board packs alike.

1. Benchmarking. Compares the firm’s processes and results against best-in-class competitors to expose gaps that internal targets hide.
2. The balanced scorecard. Tracks financial, customer, internal-process and learning measures together, so long-term health is not sacrificed to short-term numbers.
3. Budgets, audits and ratio analysis. The classical control kit: variance analysis flags where spending and returns stray from plan.
4. Responsibility centres. Each unit — cost, revenue, profit or investment centre — is answerable for the measures it can actually influence.

Why Evaluation Is Hard in Practice

Textbooks make evaluation look mechanical; reality keeps refusing. Knowing the standard difficulties is itself a favourite exam question.

1. Separating signal from noise. One bad quarter may be weather, not strategy — evaluators must judge which deviations carry meaning.
2. Time lags. Strategies mature over years, while results arrive quarterly, tempting firms to judge too early or change too often.
3. Attribution problems. Success may come from a booming market rather than the strategy, and failure may hide inside luck that rescued it.
4. Resistance and politics. The people evaluating a strategy are often the people who championed it, which blunts honest appraisal.

Conclusion: Completing the Loop

Evaluation and control are what make strategic management a cycle rather than a one-time plan. The firm analyses, chooses, implements — and then honestly measures, learns and corrects, feeding everything back into the next round of choices. A strategy process without evaluation is navigation without checking the compass; with it, even wrong turns become tuition rather than losses.

With the loop closed, the series turns outward: Part 7 takes strategy across borders into the world of multinational corporations, where every idea from Parts 1–6 is tested on a global stage.