Strategic Planning

Strategic planning can help an organization:

Solve Major organizational problems. Every executive, no matter how proficient, will have some organizational challenges. Organizations are about people first and foremost, and they bring tangible obstacles inherent in humanity. By going through a strategic planning process, identifying vision, mission and goals, the effective executive can organize and motivate around these core principles. He can better establish performance objectives and targets, and can move his team in a united direction.

Make Decisions Across Levels and Functions. Strategic planning involves a collaborative process to focus around several key objectives. All by itself, almost regardless of the outcome, strategic planning builds collaboration skills throughout the organization. When handled well with positive outcomes, strategic planning becomes the organizational success story and encourages improved interfunctional decision making.

Improve Organizational Performance. Absent the mission, vision, goals and objectives that are produced from a strategic planning process, an organization has little against which to measure performance. The old management axiom, "That which we expect, we must inspect" is never truer than in this situation. By measuring performance against objective standards, incentives will be directed toward the right issues.

Deal Effectively With Rapid Change. Strategic planning helps in dealing with change in two ways. First, effective strategic planning involves a comprehensive environmental scan in its earliest stages. This part of the process anticipates change, and attempts to identify its likely consequences and provide intervention strategies. By anticipating and preparing for change, there can be less organizational disruption. Second, the strategic planning process builds planning skills in other areas. When an organization is hit with unexpected change, there is already an organizational culture of responsiveness.

Build Teamwork and Expertise. An effective strategic planning process, as mentioned earlier, becomes an organizational success story. Collaboration through the process builds skills and relationships which can bear fruit in other areas. For example, in one strategic planning process in which I was involved, an organization brought employees from different departments together to strategize on how to reduce unneeded duplication. Among the recommendations was a single point of data entry for addresses, which was a data field that crossed many agency lines. The same team that developed the idea was charged with implementing it, and within a short time had succeeding in crossing previously "sacred" organizational turfs and making a significant change for the better.

Establish Priorities. Even though all organizations attempt to develop team approaches to solving problems, the devil is almost always in the details. Managers can have a difficult time sorting through conflicting priorities among their subordinates. Having a strategic plan helps prioritize projects and functions in ways that minimize conflict to begin with, and makes the differentiation process simpler. Whatever project best addresses the time sensitive priorities of the plan takes precedence.

Make Today's Decisions in Light of Future Consequences. Often, decision processes are driven by the urgent, not by the important. Having a comprehensive strategic plan helps identify the long term consequences of decisions now. It tends to increase the frame of reference and helps analyze decision options based on how they impact the mission and goals of the organization.

For more information on the strategic planning process, read these articles written by Wayne Parker:

Mission Statements

Identifying Organizational Values

Goal Setting

Measuring Performance