What are the best practices for balancing short-term and long-term resource allocation needs?

2 Define your short-term and long-term goals

Once you have assessed your current situation, you need to define your short-term and long-term goals. Your short-term goals are the ones that you want to achieve in the next few months or quarters, such as increasing sales, reducing costs, or launching a new product. Your long-term goals are the ones that you want to achieve in the next few years or decades, such as expanding to new markets, developing new capabilities, or creating social impact. You should make sure that your short-term and long-term goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You should also make sure that they are aligned with your vision and mission, and that they support each other.

3 Allocate your resources wisely

After you have identified your short-term and long-term goals, it is essential to allocate your resources wisely. Your resources include money, time, people, equipment, technology, and information. You should consider the urgency, impact, feasibility, and synergy of each goal when determining how much to allocate. Goals that are more urgent, impactful, feasible, and synergistic should be given more resources while those that are less so should be given less. Nevertheless, it is important to create a balanced portfolio of goals that covers both the present and the future so that you can adjust to changing conditions.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?