Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning is the formal consideration
of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with
at least one of three key questions: "What do we do?", "For whom do
we do it?" and "How do we excel?"
Strategic planning is a process of defining strategies, or directions,
and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy,
including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques
can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis and PEST
analysis.
The outcome is normally a strategic plan which is used as guidance to
define functional and divisional plans, including Technology, Marketing,
etc. In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased
"How can we beat or avoid competition?".
In many organizations,
this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is
going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some
extend their vision to 20 years.
In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know
exactly where it stands, then determines where it wants to go and how
it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan".
It is also true that strategic
planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company;
however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market
will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order
to plan your organizational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation
and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy
for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.
Vision: Defines where the organization wants to be in the future. It
reflects the optimistic view of the organization's future.
Mission: Defines where the organization is going now, basically describing
the purpose, why this organization exists.
Values: Main values protected by the organization during the progression,
reflecting the organization's culture and priorities.
Strategic planning saves time, every minute spent in planning saves
ten minutes in execution.
The purpose of individual strategic planning is for you to increase
your return on energy, the return on the mental, emotional, physical
and spiritual capital you have invested in your life and career.
Every minute an individual
spends planning their goals, activities and time in advance saves ten
minutes of work in the execution of those plans. Careful advance planning
gives you a return of ten times, or 1,000% , on your investment of mental,
emotional and physical energy.
Strategic planning is a very important business activity. It is also
important in the public sector areas such as education. It is practiced
widely informally and formally. Strategic planning and decision processes
should end with objectives and a roadmap of ways to achieve those objectives.
The following terms have
been used in Strategic Planning: desired end states, plans, policies,
goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and actions. Definitions vary,
overlap and fail to achieve clarity. The most common of these concepts
are specific, time bound statements of intended future results and general
and continuing statements of intended future results, which most models
refer to as either goals or objectives (sometimes interchangeably).
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