Strategic Planning: A Road Map to Success

Definition:

Strategies: Plans for achieving organizational goals (Stevenson, 2018, pg. 44).

Summary:

There are stages to strategic planning and it’s important that they are followed in order to achieve organizational goals:

1. Boundary Conditions and Specification of Decision Criteria: This is the first stage in the strategic planning process. It’s management’s job to visualize the scope with clarity; understanding the market and business of which they conduct to plan strategically (Kukreja, 2013). Understanding the criteria will eliminate confusion of the main objective in pursuing the organization’s goals (Kukreja, 2013).

2. Industry Analysis: There are some great tools that are available to utilize purposely to reveal opportunities and to disclose weaknesses within an organization. Tools such as SWOT, PESTLE, SCP, Porters 5 forces and Scenario Planning (Kukreja, 2013).

3. Status Quo Analysis: This specific analysis supposes that the organization doesn’t implement any type of major adjustment any time soon. The organization focuses on operational effectiveness and tactical procedures purposely to achieve more profit, lower expenses, and increased market share (Kukreja, 2013).

4. Strategic Options Generation: This step includes the Executive Committee/Senior Leadership Team and can be time consuming. The leadership team should be able to explain the specific strategy in one or two pages. Understanding key success factors promotes a crucial role in underlining different strategic options (Kukreja, 2013).

5. Options Assessment and Evaluation: Financial analysis is included at this stage and specific tools such as scenario planning are utilized. Decision making is made at this stage under uncertainty. A strategist is expected to spend some time with their appointed project team and they brainstorm amongst different scenarios, various assumptions and decisions pertaining to the price and volume of their commodity (Kukreja, 2013).

6. Articulation of Strategic Roadmap: Once the strategic options have been formulated, the strategic plan is submitted to the decision makers. Key issues must be addressed such as the game plan, goals, risks/returns and investments. There must be an agreed upon plan before implemented (Kukreja, 2013).

7. Deployment of Strategy: Once there has been a strategy document agreed upon by the leadership team, there are many different tools that can be utilized by the organization to implement their specific strategy. One that is highly effective is a Balanced Scorecard. This tool displays a visual report between the organization’s strategic objective and the key results produced by the strategy which has been implemented by the leadership team (Kukreja, 2013).

Discussion:

This specific article that I have chosen relates to the key term strategies, which pertains to planning purposely to achieve organizational goals. To produce efficiently in an organization, there must be planning conducted by the leadership team. Strategic planning is provided as a guide, giving direction in pursuit for their organization’s specified goals. Strategic planning is a game plan on how an organization attempts to profit from utilizing their resources in an efficient manner. Goals are destinations and strategies are the roadmaps purposely provided to guide an organization into success (Stevenson, 2018, pg. 45).

References

Graham, Kenny (2018) “6 Steps to Make your Strategic Plan really Strategic.”

https://hbr.org/2018/08/6-steps-to-make-your-strategic-plan-really-strategic

Kukreja, Deepak (2013) “Strategic Planning: A Roadmap to Success.”

Redman, Paul B. (2013) “Five Essentials of Strategic Planning.”

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/five_essentials_of_strategic_planning#bio-footer

Stevenson, William J. (2018) “Operations Management.” Thirteenth Edition. Published by

McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121

 

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