The two terms, #strategic #planning, don’t have to strike fear in the hearts of business executives. The strategic planning process is often employed by companies and corporations so that they can focus more on their energy, establish priorities, and fortify operations to reach goals. Employees, employers, and stakeholders play a vital role in strategic planning in a multidivisional corporation specifically. There isn’t any specific timeline that a strategic plan has to follow.
However, some businesses make their best efforts to stay forward just two to three years in the future, whereas some companies develop new strategies annually. Continue reading this post to learn more about the strategic planning process and how experts at Satori Consulting can help you get started with the strategic plan.
What is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is an essential tool that provides businesses with quantifiable objectives that are helpful in day-to-day decision-making. It helps companies perform their tasks with well-set priorities or real purpose.
Without having a clear idea in mind, entrepreneurs are likely to make wrong decisions for their business and employees can get confused about their status in the company.
A strategic planning process drives businesses down the right path and promotes the exchange of helpful ideas between people with the same objectives.
Which are Steps Required for Strategic Planning Process?
The strategic planning process is ideally a step-by-step list that is good to follow to complete and execute a strategic plan within an organization. There are many essential elements that form the strategic planning process including strategy formulation and strategic analysis together with implementation and tracking.
Indeed, the planning process needs great patience and is utterly challenging, but it can yield exceptionally high rewarding outcomes.
Let’s have a closer look at the 7 steps of the strategic planning process and the way they can affect your company.
1. Create vision and mission
If you are willing to obtain information directly from distinct stakeholders, you might probably use templates to assess how the stakeholders think about your company. To ascertain if their action is aligned with the company’s goals.
To research or create the firm’s vision and mission together with the involvement of other stakeholders to make sure it is still existing with the changes and new challenges.
2. S.W.O.T analysis
The most crucial factor of strategic planning is to understand the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of your own business – the four key factors of SWOT analysis.
The involvement of stakeholders to get their point of view about your business is crucially important. Through this step, you will gain far better acceptance from the implementers of policies and strategies.
3. Choose and create strategic options
By employing templates you can create many important strategies to deal with your company’s objectives. These strategies are significantly designed on the basis of the inputs from Stakeholders, Business, and Operation Analysis.
Often, many possible strategies are planned and each one is essential. It is usual that a company will have many crucial issues to handle. You will need to employ appropriate tools to pick the right strategies.
4. Create strategic objectives
During this stage, you will have the ability to review the general image of your business and pick a few strategic options. The templates you use can make you learn various distinct strategic options, develop crucial steps and a broad timeline to ensure the chosen options are achieved.
Commonly, measures and deadlines are determined by the leading management. It is the only purpose of this stage that the measures and timeline are S.M.A.R.T – i.e.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. The SMART strategic options will help lessen the communication toward the lower level of your company’s position for execution.
5 Execution Plan
Various companies fail to realize the potential of their strategic plans because of the weak execution. In this stage, an appropriate plan is created to execute the strategies.
6. Resource allocation
Many times, a management team allocated the chosen strategies to the fundamental personnel and left it to that individual to complete the task. On the other hand, many companies that run with minimal resources, often end up with overloaded work carried out by an individual.
7. Review
For successfully effective strategy deployment you will need to keep a consistent review of the progress and make the decisions for any variance to the strategy. It is crucial to determine what and with whom to review. Based on the progress of the strategies you might need to make new decisions.
These are the 7 essential steps to understanding what is a strategic planning process. They will ensure several choices are considered particularly its implementation, resource allocation, and execution review. Following these 7 steps make a complete cycle for existing as well as new strategic planning efforts.
