What is strategic planning?
“Strategy” creates a common understanding of what the enterprise wants to achieve and what it needs to do to achieve it. Strategic plans bridge the gap from that overall direction to the specific projects and day-to-day actions that ultimately execute the strategy.
What are the four types of strategic planning and the three levels of strategic planning?
Strategic planning starts with setting strategy at the enterprise level, but that strategy must then be turned into actions. The three levels of strategic planning typically refer to corporate versus business-unit and functional. The four types of plans are typically strategic, operational, tactical and contingency.
Why is having a strategic plan important?
An effective strategic plan helps leaders improve the focus and responsiveness of planning activities critical to achieving their long-term strategy. Leaders responsible for functional strategy can use strategic frameworks to focus their teams on what is most material.
What are the steps involved in the strategic planning process?
To build a successful strategic plan with a consistent and sequential process, functional leaders should:
- Ensure consistent usage of terms to minimise confusion in strategic planning and set a baseline for collaboration.
- Build a strong foundation for more detailed planning by setting or pressure-testing mission, vision and goal statement first.
- Streamline stakeholder input by limiting mission, vision and goal-setting to senior leadership, and leaving objective, action-plan, measure and metric development to managers with execution expertise.
What are the elements of strategic planning?
The key elements of a successful strategic plan include:
- Mission and vision. The organisation’s mission articulates its reasons for being, and the vision lays out where the organisation hopes to be. The strategic plan, which links the two, must be adaptive enough to respond if the context changes during execution.
- Strategic assumptions. To build a successful strategic plan, leadership should scope for trends and disruptions, and assess their potential impact on enterprise goals.
- Strategic plan design. A rigorous strategic planning design effectively translates the strategy into plans that can and will be executed. Poor plans lead to poor execution.
What are the key terms in strategic planning?
- Mission: Organisation’s purpose.
- Vision: Desired future state.
- Goal: Aim.
- Objective: How to reach goals.
- Action plan: What is needed to achieve objectives.
- Measures and metrics: Track progress toward goals.
How to design a strategic planning system?
Strategic planning “systems” refer to the tools used to document strategic plans. Gartner urges organisations not to focus on strategy in terms of the document they are creating. Instead, focus on turning strategy into an easily communicated action plan.
What is a strategic action plan?
The strategic action plan is a formal document that serves as the primary source of information for how objectives will be executed, monitored, controlled and closed. Many organisations also deploy an associated but separate “action plan” for achieving the operating model.
What are strategic measures and metrics?
Measures are observable outcomes that allow organisations to evaluate the efficacy of their action plans. Metrics quantify those observed changes to enable an organisation to concretely quantify its progress and stay aligned to its chosen measures.
