Strategic planning is a structured effort to identify an organization’s purpose, direction, and goals. The process involves answering three basic questions, establishing a mission and vision statement, and setting goals for the future. Different approaches can be used depending on the organization and its goals.
Strategic planning involves the structured efforts of an organization to effectively identify its purposes regarding existing ones, the direction the organization will pursue, and how that direction will enable the entity to achieve its short- and long-term goals . Individuals, businesses, governments, non-profit agencies, and any other type of organization can use this strategic planning process for the future. While the methods used in this type of planning process vary, there are some basic steps that tend to apply in any context.
The first step in any strategic planning effort is to provide answers to three basic questions. First, the entity must determine what the organization does. Next, it is necessary to define who benefits from the organization’s activities. Finally, the organization needs to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses in relation to the way these activities are carried out. Once this foundation is in place, you can move on to further refine the entity’s future goals and direction.
Many organizations believe that establishing a mission statement, along with a vision statement, can make the strategic planning process much more focused. While there is some confusion as to what is meant by each term, these two statements are actually simple to understand. The mission statement has to do with the primary purpose of the organization, the intended recipient of efforts to achieve that purpose, and the essential strategies used to achieve that purpose. In contrast, the vision statement focuses on where the entity wants to go in the future and what processes will be used to move the entity in the right direction. The two statements tend to work together and thus help create the framework under which specific policies, procedures and activities can be traced back to the ultimate goals of the organization.
A simple approach to strategic planning involves three essential steps. First, it is important to accurately assess where the entity is today, in terms of capabilities and resources. From that point, the entity identifies where it would like to be at a particular time in the future, effectively setting the goals and objectives it wishes to achieve. The final step is deciding how to successfully transition from today’s circumstances and systematically work toward those goals in an organized and logical manner. Different experts in the task of strategic planning use a variety of names for these processes and sometimes break each process down into a series of steps. The complexity of the exact approach used often has to do with the nature of the organization, the type of goals that are set, and what resources can be brought to bear in pursuit of those goals.
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