?What?s a strategic plan?
A strategic plan is a charted course for leaders and employees to get an organization to where its stakeholders would like it to be usually in 3 to 5 years. During the strategic planning process an organization establishes its strategic directions and objectives, and specifies the means to achieving these objectives including resource allocation (money, people, and effort), interim goals, and how to measure progress toward achieving these goals.
Operations and people-related benefits.
Strategic planning has a multitude of benefits to organizations. These benefits are essentially operations-related and people-related and come from simply having a plan and working together to establish and achieve common goals. In this series of five posts, we?ll consider some of the major operations-related benefits first (parts 1 to 4), and end with the major people-related benefits (part 5). I have attempted to organize the series in some meaningful way, beginning with the broad benefits, then moving into specific operational benefits, and ending with people benefits. However, this is not meant to suggest that one benefit is more important than the other. They are equally advantageous and integral to organizational growth and success. Moreover, the benefits are not discrete, they are correlated ? benefits in one area, usually mean a cascade of benefits in many areas.
Effective Control Over Change
The essential operations-related benefit of strategic planning is being able to more effectively control and manage organizational change. In general, having a solid plan for the future helps to ensure that an organization is prepared as best as possible to make positive internal changes or achieve important goals. Elements of the strategic planning process are devoted to scanning the current external (e.g., the economy) and internal trends (e.g., turnover or poor communication) in order to be able to make reasonable predictions about the future. This analysis and others allow organizations to construct a path to remediating identified problems and to actively manage changes rather than having changes and events befall them.
Planned internal cultural change.
Strategic planning helps organizations identify their priorities and their major concerns in order to develop a sound method for addressing them. The early stages of a good strategic plan must include establishing or reviewing the organization?s mission and values and describing the organizational culture. This provides a meaningful foundation for planning for the future. It reminds everyone of what is really important ? what the organization is there to do and how it is supposed to do it. Once the priorities are established, the Strategic Planning Committee can evaluate whether the organization meets these priorities or whether changes need to be made to meet them.
Are you actually delivering the best product in the fastest time? Are there children who are falling through the cracks because your intake process is inadequate? Is the morale of your employees affecting productivity? Do they need to collaborate as your Core Values state, or does that just sound like a good contemporary value you should have? Do they actually collaborate? Why?
Identifying the core issues helps leaders develop a plan to start fulfilling priorities or continue to fulfill them. Thus, an organization can conduct controlled internal change to bring the actual culture of the organization in line with the ideal culture. Importantly, a careful analysis helps organizations understand that changes or problems in one area are likely not confined to that area ? changes made to one area of the organization will spill over into areas, positively or negatively. When generating a strategic plan, then, an organization determines whether it needs to change internally, plans how to do so, and predicts how changes in one area will affect other areas of organizational life. It is more efficient and effective to control the changes within your organization rather than allow them to occur naturally. Things do not get better on their own or with quick-fix schemes.
Predicted and unpredicted external change.
Another part of creating a strategic plan is to scan the external environment (social, political, economic, environmental, and technological), define the current context, and describe its relevance to your organization. Look at the trends in these areas, do your research, and try to understand the possible changes that could happen in these areas a couple of years down the road. Your goals and strategies must be based in part on the broader context within which the organization exists. This keeps you grounded in reality and protects you to some extent from being blindsided by developments that may be in the wind.
But nothing is for sure. A careful external environment analysis provides much context, but there can be no guarantees about what is going to happen around you. However, having a plan means your organization has a touch-point when unpredicted and uncontrollable changes do occur in the environment.
Having a strategic plan means that everyone understands what is really important under normal circumstances or when slow-burning emergencies or sudden disasters occur. Not only does it help people focus, it provides comfort and keeps people centered. A strategic plan provides a starting point that helps leaders understand whether they need to deviate from the current direction temporarily or long-term, and slightly or extremely in light of the unpredicted developments. A strategic plan lays out the desired road ahead, but is also a mainstay if adaptation needs to occur. This cannot be stressed enough. Planning is critical for controlled organizational growth and development and effectively dealing with emergencies. Dealing with an emergency without a strategic plan always means starting from ground zero.
Examples.
Strategic plans help not-for-profit organizations. In a downward economic trend a charity organization constructing a strategic plan may determine that not only could their funding be cut because the money just isn?t there, but because it serves a workforce-aged population there could be reduced service demands if these people need to leave the area for opportunities elsewhere. This may suggest a need to downsize. Downsizing is a complex and delicate organizational change in itself, but the need for a charity to become smaller may reduce their funding even more and lead to concerns about service quality and the ability to continue to deliver all services. Strategic planning can help this charity prioritize and gain the needed perspective to focus on the critical issues.
Strategic planning can also help a for-profit organization that wishes to expand its product line. Strategic planning will help this organization determine where it wants to go and whether the new directions fit into their current brand (or image), and if not, whether they need to re-brand themselves. Strategic planning will help this organization understand the critical factors that must change to accommodate the new product line and the ramifications this will have on current operations and practices. A strategic plan will help this organization articulate and actualize their vision.
Planned and controlled evolution.
Whatever the results of the analysis in whatever type of organization, strategic planning is proactive rather than reactive. It is strategic, not tactical. It is a long-term solution rather than a short-term band-aid. It is planned and controlled evolutions, not impulsive or hasty modifications. Strategic planning means effective change management. Period. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dr._Jessica_Sartori
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