Strategic planning process

1. Strategic Planning process
• Often makes the difference between an organization’s
success and failure
• Follows 6 steps: Defining a mission, assessing the
organization’s competitive position, setting
organization objectives, creating strategies for
competitive differentiation, implementing the strategy
and evaluating the results and refining the plan.
• It has formed many fundamental management
decisions
• When establishing a good mission statement, is should
include the purpose for being in the business that it is
in and its overall goal

2. Strategic planning process continued…
• After mission statement is created next is determining
the company’s potential in the market
• Founders or top managers evaluate factors that could
help the company grow or could cause it to fail
• This type of analysis is called SWOT analysis: acronym
for- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats
• A SWOT analysis is not set in stone each factor may
change over time but the analysis gives management a
place to start

3. Strategic Planning Continued…
• Next is setting objectives for the firms which set guideposts
by which managers define the company’s desired
performance.
• Mission statements identifies overall goals whereas
objectives are more concrete.
• The unique combination of a company’s abilities and
resources that set it apart from its competition is known as
competitive differentiation
• Ex. Pechanga casino offers 4 diamond guest service which is
the highest quality of customer service a hospitality
company can maintain whereas other casinos offer 4 star
quality which is ranked lower than diamond standards

4. Strategic Planning Continued…
• Once those stages are complete, managers are then able to turn
the plans into actions
• Often times it is middle or supervisory management that
implements the strategies
• Finally is monitoring and adapting strategic plans when the actual
plan fails to meet performance goals
• Monitoring involves securing feedback on performance
• Example of monitoring: reading customer reviews on complaints or
how they feel the company can be better or going over projected
and actual sales
• Example of adapting: Nike noticed an increase of sales on Air Jordan
merchandise when it was put on display in the front window of the
store. To increase sales of Nike Sb line the following month, that
line was on display in the same window and revenue went up 75%