2. Strategic Planning
an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction,
and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue
this strategy.
Strategic planning is the art of formulating business
strategies, implementing them, and evaluating their impact
based on organizational objectives.
3. Strategic Planning Process
1. Strategy Formulation
In the formulation of strategies, the business assesses its current
situation by performing an internal and external audit. Strategy
formulation also involves identifying the organization’s strengths and
weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats (SWOT Analysis).
2. Strategy Implementation
It is also referred to as the action stage and is the most important
phase of strategic planning.
the company needs to establish short-term goals (usually one-year
goals), devise policies, and allocate resources for their execution.
4. Strategy Evaluation
Strategy evaluation involves three crucial activities:
reviewing the internal and external factors affecting the
implementation of the strategies,
measuring performance, and
taking corrective steps.
All the three steps in strategic planning occur in three
hierarchical levels: the corporate, middle, and operational
levels.
5. Steps in Strategic Planning:
1. Assess Industry, Competitor & Customer Trends
studying the overall market in which the organization is operating. The
organization has to study different factors like size of the industry, its
growth rate, competitors, resources available to competitors, different
policies adopted by the competitors, external political and economic
environment, changes etc.
6. 2. SWOT Analysis of the Business
A SWOT analysis critically evaluates the company's Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Every business organization has to carry out its internal
evaluation.
7. 3. Defining Vision and Mission
The mission statement states the reason behind the existence
of the business.
e. g. "Our mission is to replace expensive offline market
research with equal quality insights from social listening".
The vision statement states where the organization wants to
be in near future. The vision statements should be
quantifiable and time bound.
8. 4. Defining Corporate Business Goals
The goals help the organization to achieve the mission and
follow its vision.
Goals are the specific outcomes the business organization is
trying to achieve.
This could include things like changes to product offering,
sales & marketing strategies, financial resources, operational
efficiency, employee culture, financial targets etc.
9. 5. Setting of Department Level Objectives
After setting organizational goals, a business organization has to
decide the specific objectives and initiatives needed to be
implemented.
setting specific objectives for the product team, sales & marketing,
operations, technology, finance and human resources.
Department-level goals are limited to the handful of items that the
department can really achieve in one year.
these objectives are required to be made SMART--Specific,
Measurable, Achievable, Results-Focused and Time bound.
10. 6. Determine Staffing, Budget and Financing
Needs
Once all the departmental needs have been defined and quantified, the
organization is in a position add them up into one centralized corporate
plan, organizational structure and budget.
If the business organization doesn't have the full financial resources
required for achieving the plan, it has any of the two choices:
(i) lower the targets to an easily affordable level; or
(ii) raise the capital required achieve the organizational plan.