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What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

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Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. The strategic planning process informs your organization’s decisions, growth, and goals.

Strategic planning helps you clearly define your company’s long-term objectives—and maps how your short-term goals and work will help you achieve them. This, in turn, gives you a clear sense of where your organization is going and allows you to ensure your teams are working on projects that make the most impact. Think of it this way—if your goals and objectives are your destination on a map, your strategic plan is your navigation system.

In this article, we walk you through the 5-step strategic planning process and show you how to get started developing your own strategic plan.

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What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a business process that helps you define and share the direction your company will take in the next three to five years. During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization’s mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives. The product of the planning cycle is a strategic plan, which is shared throughout the company.

What is a strategic plan?

[inline illustration] Strategic plan elements (infographic)

A strategic plan is the end result of the strategic planning process. At its most basic, it’s a tool used to define your organization’s goals and what actions you’ll take to achieve them.

Typically, your strategic plan should include: 

Your company’s mission statement

Your organizational goals, including your long-term goals and short-term, yearly objectives

Any plan of action, tactics, or approaches you plan to take to meet those goals

What are the benefits of strategic planning?

Strategic planning can help with goal setting and decision-making by allowing you to map out how your company will move toward your organization’s vision and mission statements in the next three to five years. Let’s circle back to our map metaphor. If you think of your company trajectory as a line on a map, a strategic plan can help you better quantify how you’ll get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be in a few years).

When you create and share a clear strategic plan with your team, you can:

Build a strong organizational culture by clearly defining and aligning on your organization’s mission, vision, and goals.

Align everyone around a shared purpose and ensure all departments and teams are working toward a common objective.

Proactively set objectives to help you get where you want to go and achieve desired outcomes.

Promote a long-term vision for your company rather than focusing primarily on short-term gains.

Ensure resources are allocated around the most high-impact priorities.

Define long-term goals and set shorter-term goals to support them.

Assess your current situation and identify any opportunities—or threats—allowing your organization to mitigate potential risks.

Create a proactive business culture that enables your organization to respond more swiftly to emerging market changes and opportunities.

What are the 5 steps in strategic planning?

The strategic planning process involves a structured methodology that guides the organization from vision to implementation. The strategic planning process starts with assembling a small, dedicated team of key strategic planners—typically five to 10 members—who will form the strategic planning, or management, committee. This team is responsible for gathering crucial information, guiding the development of the plan, and overseeing strategy execution.

Once you’ve established your management committee, you can get to work on the planning process. 

Step 1: Assess your current business strategy and business environment

Before you can define where you’re going, you first need to define where you are. Understanding the external environment, including market trends and competitive landscape, is crucial in the initial assessment phase of strategic planning.

To do this, your management committee should collect a variety of information from additional stakeholders, like employees and customers. In particular, plan to gather:

Relevant industry and market data to inform any market opportunities, as well as any potential upcoming threats in the near future.

Customer insights to understand what your customers want from your company—like product improvements or additional services.

Employee feedback that needs to be addressed—whether about the product, business practices, or the day-to-day company culture.

Consider different types of strategic planning tools and analytical techniques to gather this information, such as:

A balanced scorecard to help you evaluate four major elements of a business: learning and growth, business processes, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

A SWOT analysis to help you assess both current and future potential for the business (you’ll return to this analysis periodically during the strategic planning process). 

To fill out each letter in the SWOT acronym, your management committee will answer a series of questions:

What does your organization currently do well?

What separates you from your competitors?

What are your most valuable internal resources?

What tangible assets do you have?

What is your biggest strength? 

Weaknesses:

What does your organization do poorly?

What do you currently lack (whether that’s a product, resource, or process)?

What do your competitors do better than you?

What, if any, limitations are holding your organization back?

What processes or products need improvement? 

Opportunities:

What opportunities does your organization have?

How can you leverage your unique company strengths?

Are there any trends that you can take advantage of?

How can you capitalize on marketing or press opportunities?

Is there an emerging need for your product or service? 

What emerging competitors should you keep an eye on?

Are there any weaknesses that expose your organization to risk?

Have you or could you experience negative press that could reduce market share?

Is there a chance of changing customer attitudes towards your company? 

Step 2: Identify your company’s goals and objectives

To begin strategy development, take into account your current position, which is where you are now. Then, draw inspiration from your vision, mission, and current position to identify and define your goals—these are your final destination. 

To develop your strategy, you’re essentially pulling out your compass and asking, “Where are we going next?” “What’s the ideal future state of this company?” This can help you figure out which path you need to take to get there.

During this phase of the planning process, take inspiration from important company documents, such as:

Your mission statement, to understand how you can continue moving towards your organization’s core purpose.

Your vision statement, to clarify how your strategic plan fits into your long-term vision.

Your company values, to guide you towards what matters most towards your company.

Your competitive advantages, to understand what unique benefit you offer to the market.

Your long-term goals, to track where you want to be in five or 10 years.

Your financial forecast and projection, to understand where you expect your financials to be in the next three years, what your expected cash flow is, and what new opportunities you will likely be able to invest in.

Step 3: Develop your strategic plan and determine performance metrics

Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to put pen to paper. Take your current business position and strategy into account, as well as your organization’s goals and objectives, and build out a strategic plan for the next three to five years. Keep in mind that even though you’re creating a long-term plan, parts of your plan should be created or revisited as the quarters and years go on.

As you build your strategic plan, you should define:

Company priorities for the next three to five years, based on your SWOT analysis and strategy.

Yearly objectives for the first year. You don’t need to define your objectives for every year of the strategic plan. As the years go on, create new yearly objectives that connect back to your overall strategic goals . 

Related key results and KPIs. Some of these should be set by the management committee, and some should be set by specific teams that are closer to the work. Make sure your key results and KPIs are measurable and actionable. These KPIs will help you track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

Budget for the next year or few years. This should be based on your financial forecast as well as your direction. Do you need to spend aggressively to develop your product? Build your team? Make a dent with marketing? Clarify your most important initiatives and how you’ll budget for those.

A high-level project roadmap . A project roadmap is a tool in project management that helps you visualize the timeline of a complex initiative, but you can also create a very high-level project roadmap for your strategic plan. Outline what you expect to be working on in certain quarters or years to make the plan more actionable and understandable.

Step 4: Implement and share your plan

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Strategy implementation involves clear communication across your entire organization to make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to measure the plan’s success. 

Make sure your team (especially senior leadership) has access to the strategic plan, so they can understand how their work contributes to company priorities and the overall strategy map. We recommend sharing your plan in the same tool you use to manage and track work, so you can more easily connect high-level objectives to daily work. If you don’t already, consider using a work management platform .  

A few tips to make sure your plan will be executed without a hitch: 

Communicate clearly to your entire organization throughout the implementation process, to ensure all team members understand the strategic plan and how to implement it effectively. 

Define what “success” looks like by mapping your strategic plan to key performance indicators.

Ensure that the actions outlined in the strategic plan are integrated into the daily operations of the organization, so that every team member's daily activities are aligned with the broader strategic objectives.

Utilize tools and software—like a work management platform—that can aid in implementing and tracking the progress of your plan.

Regularly monitor and share the progress of the strategic plan with the entire organization, to keep everyone informed and reinforce the importance of the plan.

Establish regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your strategic plan and make adjustments as needed. 

Step 5: Revise and restructure as needed

Once you’ve created and implemented your new strategic framework, the final step of the planning process is to monitor and manage your plan.

Remember, your strategic plan isn’t set in stone. You’ll need to revisit and update the plan if your company changes directions or makes new investments. As new market opportunities and threats come up, you’ll likely want to tweak your strategic plan. Make sure to review your plan regularly—meaning quarterly and annually—to ensure it’s still aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.

Keep in mind that your plan won’t last forever, even if you do update it frequently. A successful strategic plan evolves with your company’s long-term goals. When you’ve achieved most of your strategic goals, or if your strategy has evolved significantly since you first made your plan, it might be time to create a new one.

Build a smarter strategic plan with a work management platform

To turn your company strategy into a plan—and ultimately, impact—make sure you’re proactively connecting company objectives to daily work. When you can clarify this connection, you’re giving your team members the context they need to get their best work done. 

A work management platform plays a pivotal role in this process. It acts as a central hub for your strategic plan, ensuring that every task and project is directly tied to your broader company goals. This alignment is crucial for visibility and coordination, allowing team members to see how their individual efforts contribute to the company’s success. 

By leveraging such a platform, you not only streamline workflow and enhance team productivity but also align every action with your strategic objectives—allowing teams to drive greater impact and helping your company move toward goals more effectively. 

Strategic planning FAQs

Still have questions about strategic planning? We have answers.

Why do I need a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is one of many tools you can use to plan and hit your goals. It helps map out strategic objectives and growth metrics that will help your company be successful.

When should I create a strategic plan?

You should aim to create a strategic plan every three to five years, depending on your organization’s growth speed.

Since the point of a strategic plan is to map out your long-term goals and how you’ll get there, you should create a strategic plan when you’ve met most or all of them. You should also create a strategic plan any time you’re going to make a large pivot in your organization’s mission or enter new markets. 

What is a strategic planning template?

A strategic planning template is a tool organizations can use to map out their strategic plan and track progress. Typically, a strategic planning template houses all the components needed to build out a strategic plan, including your company’s vision and mission statements, information from any competitive analyses or SWOT assessments, and relevant KPIs.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. business plan?

A business plan can help you document your strategy as you’re getting started so every team member is on the same page about your core business priorities and goals. This tool can help you document and share your strategy with key investors or stakeholders as you get your business up and running.

You should create a business plan when you’re: 

Just starting your business

Significantly restructuring your business

If your business is already established, you should create a strategic plan instead of a business plan. Even if you’re working at a relatively young company, your strategic plan can build on your business plan to help you move in the right direction. During the strategic planning process, you’ll draw from a lot of the fundamental business elements you built early on to establish your strategy for the next three to five years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. mission and vision statements?

Your strategic plan, mission statement, and vision statements are all closely connected. In fact, during the strategic planning process, you will take inspiration from your mission and vision statements in order to build out your strategic plan.

Simply put: 

A mission statement summarizes your company’s purpose.

A vision statement broadly explains how you’ll reach your company’s purpose.

A strategic plan pulls in inspiration from your mission and vision statements and outlines what actions you’re going to take to move in the right direction. 

For example, if your company produces pet safety equipment, here’s how your mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan might shake out:

Mission statement: “To ensure the safety of the world’s animals.” 

Vision statement: “To create pet safety and tracking products that are effortless to use.” 

Your strategic plan would outline the steps you’re going to take in the next few years to bring your company closer to your mission and vision. For example, you develop a new pet tracking smart collar or improve the microchipping experience for pet owners. 

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. company objectives?

Company objectives are broad goals. You should set these on a yearly or quarterly basis (if your organization moves quickly). These objectives give your team a clear sense of what you intend to accomplish for a set period of time. 

Your strategic plan is more forward-thinking than your company goals, and it should cover more than one year of work. Think of it this way: your company objectives will move the needle towards your overall strategy—but your strategic plan should be bigger than company objectives because it spans multiple years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a business case?

A business case is a document to help you pitch a significant investment or initiative for your company. When you create a business case, you’re outlining why this investment is a good idea, and how this large-scale project will positively impact the business. 

You might end up building business cases for things on your strategic plan’s roadmap—but your strategic plan should be bigger than that. This tool should encompass multiple years of your roadmap, across your entire company—not just one initiative.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a project plan?

A strategic plan is a company-wide, multi-year plan of what you want to accomplish in the next three to five years and how you plan to accomplish that. A project plan, on the other hand, outlines how you’re going to accomplish a specific project. This project could be one of many initiatives that contribute to a specific company objective which, in turn, is one of many objectives that contribute to your strategic plan. 

What’s the difference between strategic management vs. strategic planning?

A strategic plan is a tool to define where your organization wants to go and what actions you need to take to achieve those goals. Strategic planning is the process of creating a plan in order to hit your strategic objectives.

Strategic management includes the strategic planning process, but also goes beyond it. In addition to planning how you will achieve your big-picture goals, strategic management also helps you organize your resources and figure out the best action plans for success. 

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What is strategic planning?

What is strategic plan management?

Benefits of robust strategic planning and management

10 steps in the strategic planning process.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

It’s that time again. 

Every three to five years, most larger organizations periodically plan for the future. Many times strategic planning documents are shelved and forgotten until the next cycle begins. On the other hand, many smaller and newer organizations, propelled by urgency, may not devote the necessary time and energy to the strategic planning process. 

Only 63% of businesses plan more than a year out. They fail to see that — contrary to Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat — “any way” does not take you there. 

For all organizations, a more rigorous annual planning process is critical for driving future success, profitability, value, and impact.

John Kotter, a former professor at Harvard Business School and noted expert on innovation says, “ Strategy should be viewed as a dynamic force that constantly seeks opportunities, identifies initiatives that will capitalize on them, and completes those initiatives swiftly and efficiently.”

There’s hardly a better case that can be made for dynamic planning than in the tech industry, where mergers and acquisitions are accelerating exponentially. Companies need to be nimble enough to navigate rapid change . In this case, planning should occur quarterly.

Strategic planning is an ongoing process by which an organization sets its forward course by bringing all of its stakeholders together to examine current realities and define its vision for the future.

It examines its strengths and weaknesses, resources available, and opportunities. Strategic planning seeks to anticipate future industry trends .  During the process, the organization creates a vision, articulates its purpose, and sets strategic goals that are long-term and forward-focused. 

Those strategic goals inform operational goals and incremental milestones that need to be reached. The operational plan has clear objectives and supporting initiatives tied to metrics to which everyone is accountable . The plan should be agile enough to allow for recalibrating when necessary and redistributing resources based on internal and external forces.

The output of the planning process is a document that is shared across the enterprise. 

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Strategic planning for individuals

Strategic planning isn’t just for companies. At BetterUp, strategic planning is one of the skills that we identify, track, and develop within the Whole Person Model . For individuals, strategic planning is the ability to think through ways to achieve desired outcomes. Just as strategic planning helps organizations realize their goals for the future, it helps individuals grow and achieve goals in a unified direction. 

Working backward from the desired outcome, effective strategic planning consists of coming up with the steps we need to take today in order to get where we want to be tomorrow. 

While no plan is infallible, people who develop this skill are good at checking to make sure that their actions are in alignment with the outcomes that they want to see in the future. Even when things don’t go according to plan, their long-term goals act as a “North star” to get them back on course. In addition, envisioning desired future states and figuring out how to turn them into reality enhances an individual’s sense of personal meaning and motivation. 

Whether we’re talking about strategic planning for the company or the individual, strategic plans can go awry in a variety of ways including: 

  • Unrealistic goals and too many priorities
  • Poor communication
  • Using the wrong measures
  • Lack of leadership

The extent to which that document is shelved until the next planning cycle or becomes a dynamic map of the future depends on the people responsible for overseeing the execution of the plan.

strategic-planning-person-smiling-at-his-computer

What is strategic plan management? 

"Most people think of strategy as an event, but that’s not the way the world works," according to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. "When we run into unanticipated opportunities and threats, we have to respond. Sometimes we respond successfully; sometimes we don’t. But most strategies develop through this process. More often than not, the strategy that leads to success emerges through a process that works 24/7 in almost every industry."

Strategic business management is the ongoing process by which an organization creates and sustains a successful roadmap that moves the company in the direction it needs to move, year after year, for long-term success. It spans from research and formulation to execution, evaluation, and adjustment. Given the pace of change, strategic management is more relevant and important than ever for assigning measurable goals and action steps

Many organizations fail because they don’t have the strategic management team at the table right from the beginning of the planning process. A strategic plan is only as good as its ability to be executed and sustained. 

A strategic management initiative might be driven by an internal group — many companies have an internal strategy team — or an outside consulting firm. Ultimately company leaders need to own executing and sustaining the strategy. 

Strategic management teams

In this Harvard Business Review article, Ron Carucci from consulting firm Navalent reports that 61% of executives in a 10-year longitudinal study felt they were not prepared for the strategic challenges they faced upon being appointed to senior leadership roles. Lack of commitment to the plan is also a contributing factor. In addition, leaders attending to quarterly targets, crisis management , and reconciling budgets often consider the execution of a long-term strategy a low priority.

A dedicated strategic management team works with those senior leaders and managers throughout the organization to communicate, coordinate and evaluate progress against goals. They tie strategic objectives to day-to-day operational metrics throughout the enterprise. 

A good strategic management group can assist in creating a culture of empowerment and learning . It holds regular meetings with employees. It sets a clear agenda and expectations to make the strategic plan real and compelling to the organization through concrete objectives, results, and timelines. 

Strategy development is a lot of work, but the benefits are lasting. After all, as the saying goes, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Taking the time for review and planning activities has the following benefits:

  • Organizations and people are set up to succeed
  • Increased likelihood of staying on track
  • Decreased likelihood of being distracted or derailed
  • Progress through the plan is communicated throughout the organization
  • Metrics facilitate course correction
  • Budgets enterprise-wide are based on strategy
  • Cross-organization alignment
  • Robust employee performance and compensation plans
  • Commitment to learning and training
  • A robust strategic planning process gets everyone involved and invested in the organizations
  • Employees inform management about what’s working or not working at the operational level
  • Innovation is encouraged and rewarded
  • Increased productivity

1. Define mission and vision  

Begin by articulating the organization's vision for the future. Ask, "What would success look like in five years?" Create a mission statement describing organizational values and how you intend to reach the vision. What values inform and determine mission, vision, and purpose?

Purpose-driven strategic goals articulate the “why” of what the corporation is doing. It connects the vision statement to specific objectives, drawing a line between the larger goals and the work that teams and individuals do.

2. Conduct a comprehensive assessment  

This stage includes identifying an organization’s strategic position.

Gathering data from internal and external environments and respective stakeholders takes place at this time. Involving employees and customers in the research.

The task is to gather market data through research. One of the most critical components of this stage is a comprehensive SWOT analysis that involves gathering people and bringing perspectives from all stakeholders to determine:

  • W eaknesses
  • O pportunities

Strengths and weaknesses  — In this stage, planners identify the company’s assets that contribute to its current competitive advantage and/or the likelihood of a significant increase in the organization’s market share in the future. It should be an objective assessment rather than an inflated perspective of its strengths. 

An accurate assessment of weaknesses requires looking outward at external forces that can reveal new opportunities as well as threats. Consider the massive shift in multiple industries whose strategy has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While it was disastrous to the airline and restaurant industries’ business models , tech companies were able to seize the opportunity and address the demands of remote work. 

Michael Porter’s book Competetive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors claims that there are five forces at work in an industry that influence that industry’s ability to develop a competitive strategy. Since the book was published in 1979, organizations have turned to Porter’s theory to create their strategic framework. 

Here are the 5 forces (and key questions) that determine the competitive strategy for most industries.

  • Competitive rivalry : When considering the strengths of an organization’s competitors it’s important to ask: How do our products/services hold up to our competition? If the rivalry is intense, companies need to consider what capacity they have to gain leverage through price cuts or bold marketing strategies. If there is little competition, the organization has a substantial gain in the market.
  • Supplier power: How might suppliers influence strategy? For example, what if suppliers raised their prices? To what extent would a company need a particular supplier for our product(s)? Is it possible to switch suppliers in a way that is more cost effective and efficient? The number of suppliers that exist will determine your ability to keep costs low.
  • Buyer power: To what extent do buyers have the ability to shop around right into the hands of your competitors? How much power does your customer base have in determining price? A small number of well-informed buyers shifts the power in their direction while a large pool may give you the strategic advantage
  • Threat of substitution:  What is the threat of a company’s buyer substituting your services/products from the competition? What if the buyer figures out another way to access the services/products that it offers?
  • Threat of new entry:  How easy is it for newcomers to enter the organization’s market?

strategic-planning-a-group-talks-in-a-room

3. Forecast  

Considering the factors above, determine the company’s value through financial forecasting . While almost certainly to become a moving target influenced by the five forces, a forecast can assign initial anticipated measurable results expected in the plan or ROI: profits/cost of investment.

4. Set the organizational direction of the business

The above research and assessment will help an organization to set goals and priorities. Too often an organization’s strategic plan is too broad and over-ambitious. Planners need to ask, ”What kind of impact are we seeking to have, and in what time frame?” They need to drill down to objectives that will have the most impact. 

5. Create strategic objectives

This next phase of operational planning consists of creating strategic objectives and initiatives. Kaplan and Norton posit in their balanced scorecard methodology that there are four perspectives for consideration in identifying the conditions for success. They are interrelated and must be evaluated simultaneously.

  • Financial : Such considerations as growing shareholder value, increasing revenue, managing cost, profitability, or financial stability inform strategic initiatives. 
  • Customer-satisfaction:  Objectives can be determined by identifying targets related to one or some of the following: value for the cost, best service, increased market share, or providing customers with solutions.
  • Internal processes such as operational processes and efficiencies, investment in innovation, investment in total quality and performance management , cost reduction, improvement of workplace safety, or streamlining processes.
  • Learning and growth: Organizations must ask: Are initiatives in place in terms of human capital and learning and growth to sustain change? Objectives may include employee retention, productivity, building high-performing teams, or creating a pipeline for future leaders .

6. Align with key stakeholders

It’s a team effort. The success of the plan is in direct proportion to the organization’s commitment to inform and engage the entire workforce in strategy execution. People will only be committed to strategy implementation when they're connected to the organization's goals. With everyone pulling in the same direction, cross-functional decision-making becomes easier and more aligned.

7. Begin strategy mapping

A strategy map is a powerful tool for illustrating the cause-effect of those perspectives and connecting them to between 12 and 18 strategic objectives. Since most people are visual learners, the map provides an easy-to-understand diagram for everyone in the organization creating shared knowledge at all levels.

8. Determine strategic initiatives

Following the development of strategic objectives, strategic initiatives are determined. These are the actions the organization will take to reach those objectives. They may relate initiatives related to factors such as scope, budget, raising brand awareness, product development, and employee training.

9. Benchmark performance measures and analysis

Strategic initiatives inform SMART goals to which metrics are assigned to evaluate performance. These measures cascade from senior management to management to front-line workers. At this stage, the task is to create goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based informing the operational plan.

Benchmarks are established against so that performance can be measures, and a time frame is created. Key performance indicators (KPI’s) are assigned based on organizational goals. These indicators align workers’ performance and productivity with long-term strategic objectives. 

10. Performance evaluation

Assessment of whether the plan has been successful . It measures activities and progress toward objectives and allows for the creation of improved plans and objectives in order to improve overall performance . 

Think of strategic planning as a circular process beginning and ending with evaluation. Adjust a  plan as necessary. The pace at which review of the plan is necessary may be once a year for many organizations or quarterly for organizations in rapidly evolving industries. 

Prioritizing the strategic planning process

The strategic planning meeting may have a reputation for being just another to-do, but it might be time to take a second look. With the right action plan and a little strategic thinking, you can reinvigorate your business environment and start planning for success.

It's that time to get excited about the future again.

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Meredith Betz

Betterup Fellow Coach, M.S.Ed, M.S.O.D.

Contingency planning: 4 steps to prepare for the unexpected

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The strategic planning process in 4 steps, to help you throughout our strategic planning framework, we have created a how-to guide on the basics of a strategic plan, which we will take you through step-by-step..

Free Strategic Planning Guide

What is Strategic Planning?

Strategic Planning is when organizations define a bold vision and create a plan with objectives and goals to reach that future. A great strategic plan defines where your organization is going, how you’ll win, who must do what, and how you’ll review and adapt your strategy development.

What

Overview of the Strategic Planning Process:

The strategic management process involves taking your organization on a journey from point A (where you are today) to point B (your vision of the future).

Part of that journey is the strategy built during strategic planning, and part of it is execution during the strategic management process. A good strategic plan dictates “how” you travel the selected road.

Effective execution ensures you are reviewing, refreshing, and recalibrating your strategy to reach your destination. The planning process should take no longer than 90 days. But, move at a pace that works best for you and your team and leverage this as a resource.

To kick this process off, we recommend 1-2 weeks (1-hour meeting with the Owner/CEO, Strategy Director, and Facilitator (if necessary) to discuss the information collected and direction for continued planning.)

Strategic Planning Guide and Process

Questions to Ask:

  • Who is on your Planning Team? What senior leadership members and key stakeholders are included? Checkout these links you need help finding a strategic planning consultant , someone to facilitate strategic planning , or expert AI strategy consulting .
  • Who will be the business process owner (Strategy Director) of planning in your organization?
  • Fast forward 12 months from now, what do you want to see differently in your organization as a result of your strategic plan and implementation?
  • Planning team members are informed of their roles and responsibilities.
  • A strategic planning schedule is established.
  • Existing planning information and secondary data collected.

Action Grid:

What

Step 1: Determine Organizational Readiness

Set up your plan for success – questions to ask:

  • Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place at the current time? Can certain pitfalls be avoided?
  • Is this the appropriate time for your organization to initiate a planning process? Yes or no? If no, where do you go from here?

Step 2: Develop Your Team & Schedule

Who is going to be on your planning team? You need to choose someone to oversee the strategy implementation (Chief Strategy Officer or Strategy Director) and strategic management of your plan? You need some of the key individuals and decision makers for this team. It should be a small group of approximately 12-15 people.

OnStrategy is the leader in strategic planning and performance management. Our cloud-based software and hands-on services closes the gap between strategy and execution. Learn more about OnStrategy here .

Step 3: Collect Current Data

All strategic plans are developed using the following information:

  • The last strategic plan, even if it is not current
  • Mission statement, vision statement, values statement
  • Past or current Business plan
  • Financial records for the last few years
  • Marketing plan
  • Other information, such as last year’s SWOT, sales figures and projections

Step 4: Review Collected Data

Review the data collected in the last action with your strategy director and facilitator.

  • What trends do you see?
  • Are there areas of obvious weakness or strengths?
  • Have you been following a plan or have you just been going along with the market?

Conclusion: A successful strategic plan must be adaptable to changing conditions. Organizations benefit from having a flexible plan that can evolve, as assumptions and goals may need adjustments. Preparing to adapt or restart the planning process is crucial, so we recommend updating actions quarterly and refreshing your plan annually.

Strategic Planning Pyramid

Strategic Planning Phase 1: Determine Your Strategic Position

Want more? Dive into the “ Evaluate Your Strategic Position ” How-To Guide.

Action Grid

Step 1: identify strategic issues.

Strategic issues are critical unknowns driving you to embark on a robust strategic planning process. These issues can be problems, opportunities, market shifts, or anything else that keeps you awake at night and begging for a solution or decision. The best strategic plans address your strategic issues head-on.

  • How will we grow, stabilize, or retrench in order to sustain our organization into the future?
  • How will we diversify our revenue to reduce our dependence on a major customer?
  • What must we do to improve our cost structure and stay competitive?
  • How and where must we innovate our products and services?

Step 2: Conduct an Environmental Scan

Conducting an environmental scan will help you understand your operating environment. An environmental scan is called a PEST analysis, an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological trends. Sometimes, it is helpful to include Ecological and Legal trends as well. All of these trends play a part in determining the overall business environment.

Step 3: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

The reason to do a competitive analysis is to assess the opportunities and threats that may occur from those organizations competing for the same business you are. You need to understand what your competitors are or aren’t offering your potential customers. Here are a few other key ways a competitive analysis fits into strategic planning:

  • To help you assess whether your competitive advantage is really an advantage.
  • To understand what your competitors’ current and future strategies are so you can plan accordingly.
  • To provide information that will help you evaluate your strategic decisions against what your competitors may or may not be doing.

Learn more on how to conduct a competitive analysis here .

Step 4: Identify Opportunities and Threats

Opportunities are situations that exist but must be acted on if the business is to benefit from them.

What do you want to capitalize on?

  • What new needs of customers could you meet?
  • What are the economic trends that benefit you?
  • What are the emerging political and social opportunities?
  • What niches have your competitors missed?

Threats refer to external conditions or barriers preventing a company from reaching its objectives.

What do you need to mitigate? What external driving force do you need to anticipate?

Questions to Answer:

  • What are the negative economic trends?
  • What are the negative political and social trends?
  • Where are competitors about to bite you?
  • Where are you vulnerable?

Step 5: Identify Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths refer to what your company does well.

What do you want to build on?

  • What do you do well (in sales, marketing, operations, management)?
  • What are your core competencies?
  • What differentiates you from your competitors?
  • Why do your customers buy from you?

Weaknesses refer to any limitations a company faces in developing or implementing a strategy.

What do you need to shore up?

  • Where do you lack resources?
  • What can you do better?
  • Where are you losing money?
  • In what areas do your competitors have an edge?

Step 6: Customer Segments

What

Customer segmentation defines the different groups of people or organizations a company aims to reach or serve.

  • What needs or wants define your ideal customer?
  • What characteristics describe your typical customer?
  • Can you sort your customers into different profiles using their needs, wants and characteristics?
  • Can you reach this segment through clear communication channels?

Step 7: Develop Your SWOT

What

A SWOT analysis is a quick way of examining your organization by looking at the internal strengths and weaknesses in relation to the external opportunities and threats. Creating a SWOT analysis lets you see all the important factors affecting your organization together in one place.

It’s easy to read, easy to communicate, and easy to create. Take the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats you developed earlier, review, prioritize, and combine like terms. The SWOT analysis helps you ask and answer the following questions: “How do you….”

  • Build on your strengths
  • Shore up your weaknesses
  • Capitalize on your opportunities
  • Manage your threats

What

Strategic Planning Process Phase 2: Developing Strategy

Want More? Deep Dive Into the “Developing Your Strategy” How-To Guide.

Step 1: Develop Your Mission Statement

The mission statement describes an organization’s purpose or reason for existing.

What is our purpose? Why do we exist? What do we do?

  • What are your organization’s goals? What does your organization intend to accomplish?
  • Why do you work here? Why is it special to work here?
  • What would happen if we were not here?

Outcome: A short, concise, concrete statement that clearly defines the scope of the organization.

Step 2: discover your values.

Your values statement clarifies what your organization stands for, believes in and the behaviors you expect to see as a result. Check our the post on great what are core values and examples of core values .

How will we behave?

  • What are the key non-negotiables that are critical to the company’s success?
  • What guiding principles are core to how we operate in this organization?
  • What behaviors do you expect to see?
  • If the circumstances changed and penalized us for holding this core value, would we still keep it?

Outcome: Short list of 5-7 core values.

Step 3: casting your vision statement.

What

A Vision Statement defines your desired future state and directs where we are going as an organization.

Where are we going?

  • What will our organization look like 5–10 years from now?
  • What does success look like?
  • What are we aspiring to achieve?
  • What mountain are you climbing and why?

Outcome: A picture of the future.

Step 4: identify your competitive advantages.

How to Identify Competitive Advantages

A competitive advantage is a characteristic of an organization that allows it to meet its customer’s need(s) better than its competition can. It’s important to consider your competitive advantages when creating your competitive strategy.

What are we best at?

  • What are your unique strengths?
  • What are you best at in your market?
  • Do your customers still value what is being delivered? Ask them.
  • How do your value propositions stack up in the marketplace?

Outcome: A list of 2 or 3 items that honestly express the organization’s foundation for winning.

Step 5: crafting your organization-wide strategies.

What

Your competitive strategy is the general methods you intend to use to reach your vision. Regardless of the level, a strategy answers the question “how.”

How will we succeed?

  • Broad: market scope; a relatively wide market emphasis.
  • Narrow: limited to only one or few segments in the market
  • Does your competitive position focus on lowest total cost or product/service differentiation or both?

Outcome: Establish the general, umbrella methods you intend to use to reach your vision.

What

Phase 3: Strategic Plan Development

Want More? Deep Dive Into the “Build Your Plan” How-To Guide.

Strategic Planning Process Step 1: Use Your SWOT to Set Priorities

If your team wants to take the next step in the SWOT analysis, apply the TOWS Strategic Alternatives Matrix to your strategy map to help you think about the options you could pursue. To do this, match external opportunities and threats with your internal strengths and weaknesses, as illustrated in the matrix below:

TOWS Strategic Alternatives Matrix

Evaluate the options you’ve generated, and identify the ones that give the greatest benefit, and that best achieve the mission and vision of your organization. Add these to the other strategic options that you’re considering.

Step 2: Define Long-Term Strategic Objectives

Long-Term Strategic Objectives are long-term, broad, continuous statements that holistically address all areas of your organization. What must we focus on to achieve our vision? Check out examples of strategic objectives here. What are the “big rocks”?

Questions to ask:

  • What are our shareholders or stakeholders expectations for our financial performance or social outcomes?
  • To reach our outcomes, what value must we provide to our customers? What is our value proposition?
  • To provide value, what process must we excel at to deliver our products and services?
  • To drive our processes, what skills, capabilities and organizational structure must we have?

Outcome: Framework for your plan – no more than 6. You can use the balanced scorecard framework, OKRs, or whatever methodology works best for you. Just don’t exceed 6 long-term objectives.

Strategy Map

Step 3: Setting Organization-Wide Goals and Measures

What

Once you have formulated your strategic objectives, you should translate them into goals and measures that can be communicated to your strategic planning team (team of business leaders and/or team members).

You want to set goals that convert the strategic objectives into specific performance targets. Effective strategic goals clearly state what, when, how, and who, and they are specifically measurable. They should address what you must do in the short term (think 1-3 years) to achieve your strategic objectives.

Organization-wide goals are annual statements that are SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, responsible, and time-bound. These are outcome statements expressing a result to achieve the desired outcomes expected in the organization.

What is most important right now to reach our long-term objectives?

Outcome: clear outcomes for the current year..

Strategic Planning Outcomes Table

Step 4: Select KPIs

What

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the key measures that will have the most impact in moving your organization forward. We recommend you guide your organization with measures that matter. See examples of KPIs here.

How will we measure our success?

Outcome: 5-7 measures that help you keep the pulse on your performance. When selecting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), ask, “What are the key performance measures we need to track to monitor if we are achieving our goals?” These KPIs include the key goals you want to measure that will have the most impact on moving your organization forward.

Step 5: Cascade Your Strategies to Operations

NPS Step #5

To move from big ideas to action, creating action items and to-dos for short-term goals is crucial. This involves translating strategy from the organizational level to individuals. Functional area managers and contributors play a role in developing short-term goals to support the organization.

Before taking action, decide whether to create plans directly derived from the strategic plan or sync existing operational, business, or account plans with organizational goals. Avoid the pitfall of managing multiple sets of goals and actions, as this shifts from strategic planning to annual planning.

Questions to Ask

  • How are we going to get there at a functional level?
  • Who must do what by when to accomplish and drive the organizational goals?
  • What strategic questions still remain and need to be solved?

Department/functional goals, actions, measures and targets for the next 12-24 months

Step 6: Cascading Goals to Departments and Team Members

Now in your Departments / Teams, you need to create goals to support the organization-wide goals. These goals should still be SMART and are generally (short-term) something to be done in the next 12-18 months. Finally, you should develop an action plan for each goal.

Keep the acronym SMART in mind again when setting action items, and make sure they include start and end dates and have someone assigned their responsibility. Since these action items support your previously established goals, it may be helpful to consider action items your immediate plans on the way to achieving your (short-term) goals. In other words, identify all the actions that need to occur in the next 90 days and continue this same process every 90 days until the goal is achieved.

Examples of Cascading Goals:

What

Phase 4: Executing Strategy and Managing Performance

Want more? Dive Into the “Managing Performance” How-To Guide.

Step 1: Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule

Implementation is the process that turns strategies and plans into actions in order to accomplish strategic objectives and goals.

How will we use the plan as a management tool?

  • Communication Schedule: How and when will you roll-out your plan to your staff? How frequently will you send out updates?
  • Process Leader: Who is your strategy director?
  • Structure: What are the dates for your strategy reviews (we recommend at least quarterly)?
  • System & Reports: What are you expecting each staff member to come prepared with to those strategy review sessions?

Outcome: Syncing your plan into the “rhythm of your business.”

Once your resources are in place, you can set your implementation schedule. Use the following steps as your base implementation plan:

  • Establish your performance management and reward system.
  • Set up monthly and quarterly strategy meetings with established reporting procedures.
  • Set up annual strategic review dates including new assessments and a large group meeting for an annual plan review.

Now you’re ready to start plan roll-out. Below are sample implementation schedules, which double for a full strategic management process timeline.

Strategic Planning Calendar

Step 2: Tracking Goals & Actions

Monthly strategy meetings don’t need to take a lot of time – 30 to 60 minutes should suffice. But it is important that key team members report on their progress toward the goals they are responsible for – including reporting on metrics in the scorecard they have been assigned.

By using the measurements already established, it’s easy to make course corrections if necessary. You should also commit to reviewing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) during these regular meetings. Need help comparing strategic planning software ? Check out our guide.

Effective Strategic Planning: Your Bi-Annual Checklist

What

Never lose sight of the fact that strategic plans are guidelines, not rules. Every six months or so, you should evaluate your strategy execution and strategic plan implementation by asking these key questions:

  • Will your goals be achieved within the time frame of the plan? If not, why?
  • Should the deadlines be modified? (Before you modify deadlines, figure out why you’re behind schedule.)
  • Are your goals and action items still realistic?
  • Should the organization’s focus be changed to put more emphasis on achieving your goals?
  • Should your goals be changed? (Be careful about making these changes – know why efforts aren’t achieving the goals before changing the goals.)
  • What can be gathered from an adaptation to improve future planning activities?

Why Track Your Goals?

  • Ownership: Having a stake and responsibility in the plan makes you feel part of it and leads you to drive your goals forward.
  • Culture: Successful plans tie tracking and updating goals into organizational culture.
  • Implementation: If you don’t review and update your strategic goals, they are just good intentions
  • Accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source and initiative must have an owner.
  • Empowerment: Changing goals from In Progress to Complete just feels good!

Step 3: Review & Adapt

Guidelines for your strategy review.

The most important part of this meeting is a 70/30 review. 30% is about reviewing performance, and 70% should be spent on making decisions to move the company’s strategy forward in the next quarter.

The best strategic planners spend about 60-90 minutes in the sessions. Holding meetings helps focus your goals on accomplishing top priorities and accelerating the organization’s growth. Although the meeting structure is relatively simple, it does require a high degree of discipline.

Strategy Review Session Questions:

Strategic planning frequently asked questions, read our frequently asked questions about strategic planning to learn how to build a great strategic plan..

Strategic planning is when organizations define a bold vision and create a plan with objectives and goals to reach that future. A great strategic plan defines where your organization is going, how you’ll win, who must do what, and how you’ll review and adapt your strategy..

Your strategic plan needs to include an assessment of your current state, a SWOT analysis, mission, vision, values, competitive advantages, growth strategy, growth enablers, a 3-year roadmap, and annual plan with strategic goals, OKRs, and KPIs.

A strategic planning process should take no longer than 90 days to complete from start to finish! Any longer could fatigue your organization and team.

There are four overarching phases to the strategic planning process that include: determining position, developing your strategy, building your plan, and managing performance. Each phase plays a unique but distinctly crucial role in the strategic planning process.

Prior to starting your strategic plan, you must go through this pre-planning process to determine your organization’s readiness by following these steps:

Ask yourself these questions: Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place now? Can we foresee any pitfalls that we can avoid? Is there an appropriate time for our organization to initiate this process?

Develop your team and schedule. Who will oversee the implementation as Chief Strategy Officer or Director? Do we have at least 12-15 other key individuals on our team?

Research and Collect Current Data. Find the following resources that your organization may have used in the past to assist you with your new plan: last strategic plan, mission, vision, and values statement, business plan, financial records, marketing plan, SWOT, sales figures, or projections.

Finally, review the data with your strategy director and facilitator and ask these questions: What trends do we see? Any obvious strengths or weaknesses? Have we been following a plan or just going along with the market?

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6 Steps to Make Your Strategic Plan Really Strategic

  • Graham Kenny

steps involved in a strategic plan

You don’t need dozens of strategic goals.

Many strategic plans aren’t strategic, or even plans. To fix that, try a six step process: first, identify key stakeholders. Second, identify a specific, very important key stakeholder: your target customer. Third, figure out what these stakeholders want from you. Fourth, figure out what you want from them. Fifth, design your strategy around these requirements. Sixth, focus on continuously improving this plan.

Why is it that when a group of managers gets together for a strategic planning session they often emerge with a document that’s devoid of “strategy”, and often not even a plan ?

steps involved in a strategic plan

  • Graham Kenny is CEO of  Strategic Factors and author of the book Strategy Discovery.   He is a recognized expert in strategy and performance measurement who helps managers, executives, and boards create successful organizations in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. He has been a professor of management in universities in the U.S., and Canada.  You can connect to or follow him on  LinkedIn .

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MindManager Blog

The six steps of the strategic planning process

July 27, 2023 by MindManager Blog

Strategic planning is one of the most important undertakings that a business can engage in. However, it can also be one of the most overwhelming ones unless you understand how the strategic planning process works.

You’re probably asking yourself: “Where should I begin? How do I decide what my strategic plan should include? When should others get involved?”

Rest assured, we’ll answer these questions and more in this article.

Keep reading for a brief introduction to the strategic planning process where we’ll discuss the various strategic planning frameworks, common strategic planning goals, and the different stages of the strategic planning process.

We’ll even give a relevant example, so you can imagine how the strategic planning process might work at your own organization.

So, to get started, let’s delve into strategic planning frameworks …

The strategic planning process | MindManager Blog

What are strategic planning frameworks?

Since the 1950s, there have literally been hundreds of different strategic planning frameworks that have been developed, including popular models like OGSM (short for Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures), Balanced Scorecard, and the 7S Model.

Frameworks such as these have been used by businesses of all sizes to achieve their objectives. While no two strategic frameworks are exactly alike, they typically all possess the following elements :

  • Vision and mission – A vision is essentially, the intention a company holds for its future (i.e. to become the #1 leader in widget manufacturing). By contrast, a mission statement describes a company’s values, as well as how that company intends to reach its vision.
  • Internal and external drivers – This element refers to forces both inside the company and outside, that can contribute to its success. For instance, an internal driver might be an organization’s leadership team, while an external driver might include a favorable business climate.
  • Tasks, objectives, and goals – Employees perform tasks to accomplish short-term objectives. These short-term objectives are developed to help companies reach their long-range goals.
  • Time frames – Time frames create urgency, while also establishing a vision for when certain objectives need to be met. Additionally, time frames help companies measure their progress.

5 Most common strategic planning goals?

Before undertaking a project plan, it’s useful for a company’s leadership team to begin thinking about which goals are most important to their organization’s success.

Typically, most strategic planning goals fall into one of the following categories:

  • Quality – This goal means that a company is trying to improve the quality of the goods and services that it provides.
  • Speed – Companies with a focus on speed want to service customers faster or speed up key manufacturing processes.
  • Dependability – Businesses that want to strengthen their reputation with customers often make dependability their primary aim.
  • Cost – Many businesses will try to cut costs by finding new ways to increase profit margins.
  • Flexibility – When flexibility is an objective, companies want to be able to react to changing marketing conditions quickly.

What are the 6 stages of the strategic planning process?

While there are many different strategic planning processes you might read about, most have some variation of the following stages :

1. Identify your strategic position

This is where a company defines short and long-term objectives, and the steps it might take to achieve them.

As an example, let’s say that a soda company envisions becoming the #1 soda company in the world. One objective to achieve that might be to increase market share 10% among baby boomers.

In that case, it would make sense to have an action step of spending more money on ads that target baby boomers.

2. Gather people and information

Is there anything that could prevent you from achieving your objective? During this phase, you’ll gather the people and information you need to determine whether there are any other factors you should consider before implementing your plan.

For instance, maybe baby boomers aren’t the best market to go after in the soda category. Perhaps, instead, our hypothetical company should target millennials.

During this analysis phase, companies tweak and refine their goals and objectives based on what they learn as they start collecting more information.

3. Perform a SWOT analysis

During this phase, you’ll identify your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Doing so will help you refine your organization’s goals, so it can proceed in the most constructive way. It’s helpful to consult a SWOT analysis template at this stage to get the most out of this exercise.

Using our soda company as an example, we might realize after performing a SWOT analysis that there’s a great opportunity in a new overseas market. So, this would replace our original objective of targeting a specific demographic.

4. Formulate a strategic plan

Having gone through the first three phases, our soda company is now ready to develop a strategic plan that takes into account all of the information it’s gathered along the way.

So, during this phase, the soda company will create a plan that details what its goals are, how it intends to achieve them, how success will be measured, and what the timeframe is for accomplishment.

5. Execute the strategic plan

Every department has a role to play in ensuring that the strategic plan gets fulfilled. So, the marketing department might create an advertising roll-out plan for the overseas market that the company plans to target.

Likewise, manufacturing may need to research overseas distribution channels, and HR will probably have to hire employees in the new market to oversee the roll-out.

6. Constantly monitor performance

In this phase, a company monitors key criteria to determine how well the organization is adhering to the plan. It also evaluates whether any tweaks need to be made along the way to achieve the company’s long-term goals.

Again, with our soda company, to do this, we’d probably start by analyzing sales trends and our percentage of market share in the roll-out region.

This concludes a standard strategic planning process.

Most strategic planning processes contain anywhere from four to seven steps, so this is only one example of how an organization might go through the strategic planning process. There are others. Really, it’s just a matter of finding a process that works best for your organization’s needs.

MindManager® can help your team manage your strategic planning process using any of the pre-built visual diagrams to map out workflow processes, internal methodologies and techniques, essential references and resources, and even future plans. Visual diagrams help teams capture and manage internal knowledge, so that productivity and information are not lost.

MindManager features a wide range of customizable visual diagram templates that teams use to help streamline their internal processes and improve business processes.

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The 5 steps of the strategic planning process

An illustration of a digital whiteboard with a bullseye diagram and sticky notes

Starting a project without a strategy is like trying to bake a cake without a recipe — you might have all the ingredients you need, but without a plan for how to combine them, or a vision for what the finished product will look like, you’re likely to end up with a mess. This is especially true when working with a team — it’s crucial to have a shared plan that can serve as a map on the pathway to success.

Creating a strategic plan not only provides a useful document for the future, but also helps you define what you have right now, and think through and outline all of the steps and considerations you’ll need to succeed.

What is strategic planning?

While there is no single approach to creating a strategic plan, most approaches can be boiled down to five overarching steps:

  • Define your vision
  • Assess where you are
  • Determine your priorities and objectives
  • Define responsibilities
  • Measure and evaluate results

Each step requires close collaboration as you build a shared vision, strategy for implementation, and system for understanding performance.

Related: Learn how to hold an effective strategic planning meeting

Why do I need a strategic plan?

Building a strategic plan is the best way to ensure that your whole team is on the same page, from the initial vision and the metrics for success to evaluating outcomes and adjusting (if necessary) for the future. Even if you’re an expert baker, working with a team to bake a cake means having a collaborative approach and clearly defined steps so that the result reflects the strategic goals you laid out at the beginning.

The benefits of strategic planning also permeate into the general efficiency and productivity of your organization as a whole. They include: 

  • Greater attention to potential biases or flaws, improving decision-making 
  • Clear direction and focus, motivating and engaging employees
  • Better resource management, improving project outcomes 
  • Improved employee performance, increasing profitability
  • Enhanced communication and collaboration, fostering team efficiency 

Next, let’s dive into how to build and structure your strategic plan, complete with templates and assets to help you along the way.

Before you begin: Pick a brainstorming method

There are many brainstorming methods you can use to come up with, outline, and rank your priorities. When it comes to strategy planning, it’s important to get everyone’s thoughts and ideas out before committing to any one strategy. With the right facilitation , brainstorming helps make this process fair and transparent for everyone involved.  

First, decide if you want to run a real-time rapid ideation session or a structured brainstorming . In a rapid ideation session, you encourage sharing half-baked or silly ideas, typically within a set time frame. The key is to just get out all your ideas quickly and then edit the best ones. Examples of rapid ideation methods include round robin , brainwriting , mind mapping , and crazy eights . 

In a structured brainstorming session, you allow for more time to prepare and edit your thoughts before getting together to share and discuss those more polished ideas. This might involve brainstorming methods that entail unconventional ways of thinking, such as reverse brainstorming or rolestorming . 

Using a platform like Mural, you can easily capture and organize your team’s ideas through sticky notes, diagrams, text, or even images and videos. These features allow you to build actionable next steps immediately (and in the same place) through color coding and tagging. 

Whichever method you choose, the ideal outcome is that you avoid groupthink by giving everyone a voice and a say. Once you’ve reached a consensus on your top priorities, add specific objectives tied to each of those priorities.

Related: Brainstorming and ideation template

1. Define your vision

Whether it’s for your business as a whole, or a specific initiative, successful strategic planning involves alignment with a vision for success. You can think of it as a project-specific mission statement or a north star to guide employees toward fulfilling organizational goals. 

To create a vision statement that explicitly states the ideal results of your project or company transformation, follow these four key steps: 

  • Engage and involve the entire team . Inclusivity like this helps bring diverse perspectives to the table. 
  • Align the vision with your core values and purpose . This will make it familiar and easy to follow through. 
  • Stay grounded . The vision should be ambitious enough to motivate and inspire yet grounded enough to be achievable and relevant.
  • Think long-term flexibility . Consider future trends and how your vision can be flexible in the face of challenges or opportunities. 

For example, say your vision is to revolutionize customer success by streamlining and optimizing your process for handling support tickets. It’s important to have a strategy map that allows stakeholders (like the support team, marketing team, and engineering team) to know the overall objective and understand the roles they will play in realizing the goals. 

This can be done in real time or asynchronously , whether in person, hybrid, or remote. By leveraging a shared digital space , everyone has a voice in the process and room to add their thoughts, comments, and feedback. 

Related: Vision board template

2. Assess where you are

The next step in creating a strategic plan is to conduct an assessment of where you stand in terms of your own initiatives, as well as the greater marketplace. Start by conducting a resource assessment. Figure out which financial, human, and/or technological resources you have available and if there are any limitations. You can do this using a SWOT analysis.

What is SWOT analysis?

SWOT analysis is an exercise where you define:

  • Strengths: What are your unique strengths for this initiative or this product? In what ways are you a leader?
  • Weaknesses: What weaknesses can you identify in your offering? How does your product compare to others in the marketplace?
  • Opportunities: Are there areas for improvement that'd help differentiate your business?
  • Threats: Beyond weaknesses, are there existing potential threats to your idea that could limit or prevent its success? How can those be anticipated?

For example, say you have an eco-friendly tech company and your vision is to launch a new service in the next year. Here’s what the SWOT analysis might look like: 

  • Strengths : Strong brand reputation, loyal customer base, and a talented team focused on innovation
  • Weaknesses : Limited bandwidth to work on new projects, which might impact the scope of its strategy formulation 
  • Opportunities : How to leverage and experiment with existing customers when goal-setting
  • Threats : Factors in the external environment out of its control, like the state of the economy and supply chain shortages

This SWOT analysis will guide the company in setting strategic objectives and formulating a robust plan to navigate the challenges it might face. 

Related: SWOT analysis template

3. Determine your priorities and objectives

Once you've identified your organization’s mission and current standing, start a preliminary plan document that outlines your priorities and their corresponding objectives. Priorities and objectives should be set based on what is achievable with your available resources. The SMART framework is a great way to ensure you set effective goals . It looks like this:  

  • Specific: Set clear objectives, leaving no room for ambiguity about the desired outcomes.
  • Measurable : Choose quantifiable criteria to make it easier to track progress.
  • Achievable : Ensure it is realistic and attainable within the constraints of your resources and environment.
  • Relevant : Develop objectives that are relevant to the direction your organization seeks to move.
  • Time-bound : Set a clear timeline for achieving each objective to maintain a sense of urgency and focus.

For instance, going back to the eco-friendly tech company, the SMART goals might be: 

  • Specific : Target residential customers and small businesses to increase the sales of its solar-powered device line by 25%. 
  • Measurable : Track monthly sales and monitor customer feedback and reviews. 
  • Achievable : Allocate more resources to the marketing, sales, and customer service departments. 
  • Relevant : Supports the company's growth goals in a growing market of eco-conscious consumers. 
  • Time-bound : Conduct quarterly reviews and achieve this 25% increase in sales over the next 12 months.

With strategic objectives like this, you’ll be ready to put the work into action. 

Related: Project kickoff template

4. Define tactics and responsibilities

In this stage, individuals or units within your team can get granular about how to achieve your goals and who'll be accountable for each step. For example, the senior leadership team might be in charge of assigning specific tasks to their team members, while human resources works on recruiting new talent. 

It’s important to note that everyone’s responsibilities may shift over time as you launch and gather initial data about your project. For this reason, it’s key to define responsibilities with clear short-term metrics for success. This way, you can make sure that your plan is adaptable to changing circumstances. 

One of the more common ways to define tactics and metrics is to use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method. By outlining your OKRs, you’ll know exactly what key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and have a framework for analyzing the results once you begin to accumulate relevant data. 

For instance, if our eco-friendly tech company has a goal of increasing sales, one objective might be to expand market reach for its solar-powered products. The sales team lead would be in charge of developing an outreach strategy. The key result would be to successfully launch its products in two new regions by Q2. The KPI would be a 60% conversation rate in those targeted markets.  

Related: OKR planning template  

5. Manage, measure, and evaluate

Once your plan is set into motion, it’s important to actively manage (and measure) progress. Before launching your plan, settle on a management process that allows you to measure success or failure. In this way, everyone is aligned on progress and can come together to evaluate your strategy execution at regular intervals.

Determine the milestones at which you’ll come together and go over results — this can take place weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the nature of the project.

One of the best ways to evaluate progress is through agile retrospectives (or retros) , which can be done in real time or asynchronously. During this process, gather and organize feedback about the key elements that played a role in your strategy. 

Related: Retrospective radar template

Retrospectives are typically divided into three parts:

  • What went well.
  • What didn’t go well.
  • New opportunities for improvement.

This structure is also sometimes called the “ rose, thorn, bud ” framework. By using this approach, team members can collectively brainstorm and categorize their feedback, making the next steps clear and actionable. Creating an action plan during a post-mortem meeting is a crucial step in ensuring that lessons learned from past projects or events are effectively translated into tangible improvements. 

Another method for reviewing progress is the quarterly business review (QBR). Like the agile retrospective, it allows you to collect feedback and adjust accordingly. In the case of QBRs, however, we recommend dividing your feedback into four categories:

  • Start (what new items should be launched?).
  • Stop (what items need to be paused?).
  • Continue (what is going well?).
  • Change (what could be modified to perform better?).

Strategic planners know that planning activities continue even after a project is complete. There’s always room for improvement and an action plan waiting to be implemented. Using the above approaches, your team can make room for new ideas within the existing strategic framework in order to track better to your long-term goals.

Related: Quarterly business review template

Conclusions

The beauty of the strategic plan is that it can be applied from the campaign level all the way up to organizational vision. Using the strategic planning framework, you build buy-in , trust, and transparency by collaboratively creating a vision for success, and mapping out the steps together on the road to your goals.

Also, in so doing, you build in an ability to adapt effectively on the fly in response to data through measurement and evaluation, making your plan both flexible and resilient.

Related: 5 Tips for Holding Effective Post-mortems

Why Mural for strategic planning

Mural unlocks collaborative strategic planning through a shared digital space with an intuitive interface, a library of pre-fab templates, and methodologies based on design thinking principles.

Outline goals, identify key metrics, and track progress with a platform built for any enterprise.

Learn more about strategic planning with Mural.

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

Bryan Kitch

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5 steps of the strategic planning process

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  • Process improvement

Strategic planning process steps

  • Determine your strategic position.
  • Prioritize your objectives.
  • Develop a strategic plan.
  • Execute and manage your plan.
  • Review and revise the plan.

Because so many businesses lack in these regards, you can get ahead of the game by using strategic planning. In this article, we will explain what the strategic planning process looks like and the steps involved.

Strategic planning process

What is the strategic planning process?

In the simplest terms, the strategic planning process is the method that organizations use to develop plans to achieve overall, long-term goals.

This process differs from the project planning  process, which is used to scope and assign tasks for individual projects, or strategy mapping , which helps you determine your mission, vision, and goals.

The strategic planning process is broad—it helps you create a roadmap for which strategic objectives you should put effort into achieving and which initiatives would be less helpful to the business. 

Before you begin the strategic planning process, it is important to review some steps to set you and your organization up for success.

1. Determine your strategic position

This preparation phase sets the foundation for all work going forward. You need to know where you are to determine where you need to go and how you will get there.

Involve the right stakeholders from the start, considering both internal and external sources. Identify key strategic issues by talking with executives at your company, pulling in customer insights, and collecting industry and market data. This will give you a clear picture of your position in the market and customer insight.

It can also be helpful to review—or create if you don’t have them already—your company’s mission and vision statements to give yourself and your team a clear image of what success looks like for your business. In addition, review your company’s core values to remind yourself about how your company plans to achieve these objectives.

To get started, use industry and market data, including customer insights and current/future demands, to identify the issues that need to be addressed. Document your organization's internal strengths and weaknesses, along with external opportunities (ways your organization can grow in order to fill needs that the market does not currently fill) and threats (your competition). 

As a framework for your initial analysis, use a SWOT diagram. With input from executives, customers, and external market data, you can quickly categorize your findings as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) to clarify your current position.

SWOT analysis example

An alternative to a SWOT is PEST analysis. Standing for Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, and Technological, PEST is a strategic tool used to clarify threats and opportunities for your business. 

PEST Analysis

As you synthesize this information, your unique strategic position in the market will become clear, and you can start solidifying a few key strategic objectives. Often, these objectives are set with a three- to five-year horizon in mind.

strategic planning

Use PEST analysis for additional help with strategic planning.

2. Prioritize your objectives

Once you have identified your current position in the market, it is time to determine objectives that will help you achieve your goals. Your objectives should align with your company mission and vision.

Prioritize your objectives by asking important questions such as:

  • Which of these initiatives will have the greatest impact on achieving our company mission/vision and improving our position in the market?
  • What types of impact are most important (e.g. customer acquisition vs. revenue)?
  • How will the competition react?
  • Which initiatives are most urgent?
  • What will we need to do to accomplish our goals?
  • How will we measure our progress and determine whether we achieved our goals?

Objectives should be distinct and measurable to help you reach your long-term strategic goals and initiatives outlined in step one. Potential objectives can be updating website content, improving email open rates, and generating new leads in the pipeline.

3. Develop a plan

Now it's time to create a strategic plan to reach your goals successfully. This step requires determining the tactics necessary to attain your objectives and designating a timeline and clearly communicating responsibilities. 

Strategy mapping is an effective tool to visualize your entire plan. Working from the top-down, strategy maps make it simple to view business processes and identify gaps for improvement.

strategy map example

Truly strategic choices usually involve a trade-off in opportunity cost. For example, your company may decide not to put as much funding behind customer support, so that it can put more funding into creating an intuitive user experience.

Be prepared to use your values, mission statement, and established priorities to say “no” to initiatives that won’t enhance your long-term strategic position.  

4. Execute and manage the plan

Once you have the plan, you’re ready to implement it. First, communicate the plan to the organization by sharing relevant documentation. Then, the actual work begins.

Turn your broader strategy into a concrete plan by mapping your processes. Use key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards to communicate team responsibilities clearly. This granular approach illustrates the completion process and ownership for each step of the way. 

Set up regular reviews with individual contributors and their managers and determine check-in points to ensure you’re on track.

5. Review and revise the plan

The final stage of the plan—to review and revise—gives you an opportunity to reevaluate your priorities and course-correct based on past successes or failures.

On a quarterly basis, determine which KPIs your team has met and how you can continue to meet them, adapting your plan as necessary. On an annual basis, it’s important to reevaluate your priorities and strategic position to ensure that you stay on track for success in the long run.

Track your progress using balanced scorecards to comprehensively understand of your business's performance and execute strategic goals. 

balanced scorecard template

Over time you may find that your mission and vision need to change — an annual evaluation is a good time to consider those changes, prepare a new plan, and implement again. 

strategic planning

Achieve your goals and monitor your progress with balanced scorecards.

Master the strategic planning process steps

As you continue to implement the strategic planning process, repeating each step regularly, you will start to make measurable progress toward achieving your company’s vision.

Instead of constantly putting out fires, reacting to the competition, or focusing on the latest hot-button initiative, you’ll be able to maintain a long-term perspective and make decisions that will keep you on the path to success for years to come.

strategic planning

Use a strategy map to turn your organization's mission and vision into actionable objectives.

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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Strategic Planning 101: What you need to know to grow

Download our free Strategic Planning Template Download this template

An introduction to strategic planning

Organizations often fail at strategy execution. Despite the best-laid plans, everyone is lost and organizational goals never become a reality.

Why? Because of a hard truth that many leaders hate to admit: 

Strategy doesn’t belong in the boardroom. In 2022, you simply can’t be effective if your strategy isn’t a human-centric one that invites everyone on board. 

This article will explore this truth and give you the strategic advice you need to make your company plan work this year. 

Check out our strategic planning software product overview to see how Cascade can help your organization execute its strategy!

In this article we explore:

What is strategic planning?

What are the benefits of strategic planning, what’s the difference between strategic planning and strategic management, what are the steps involved in the strategic planning process, 3 critical principles for strategic planning success.

Free Download Download our Strategic Planning Template Download this template

Alternatively, if you’re ready to dive into strategic planning, download our free ready-to-go strategic planning template that will guide you from vision to results.

Strategic planning is a management activity organizations use to align human resources, business operations, and budgets .

Aligning these resources empowers all employees and stakeholders to focus on meaningful work that moves them closer to their shared organizational goals and company vision.

This dynamic method of business planning goes far beyond setting short-term goals to consider the entire business environment, define the long-term direction of a company, and the best way to get there. 

Think of the concept as planning a mountain climbing expedition. If your entire team runs up the mountain in a random direction before anybody puts their boots on, pretty soon, disaster will strike. With a strategic plan, there's less chance of an epic fall.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan outlines an organization’s action steps to accomplish its vision . 

Many traditional strategic plans gather dust in long-forgotten spreadsheets or PowerPoints. 

Successful companies bring their strategy to life with an ever-evolving digital asset of their plan that connects their day-to-day activities to the bigger picture.

If your organization takes the right approach, your strategic plan will

  • Define the organization's mission and long-term vision for a period of three to five years.
  • Inform the company’s quarterly and annual goals .
  • Include the planned course of action to achieve these goals.
  • Specify key performance indicators (KPIs) in each project .

Sounds simple in theory, right?

Unfortunately, strategic thinking doesn’t come easy for everyone. 

Let's see what you can gain when you get better at planning with strategic issues and your organization's mission in mind.

Most strategies fail due to a lack of clarity and transparency . If there is no clear sense of direction or trust, how can you instruct your team? How will you inspire them to follow you?

When you take the time to set your strategy up correctly, you give your organization a massive competitive edge. Here are four ways strategic planning can help your company:

1. Narrow your focus

Your team must consider a plethora of channels, platforms, mediums, tools, and tactics in 2022. Without a strategy, your team can lose time on irrelevant or inefficient activities. A strategic plan gives your team a blueprint to reach your goals . 

When you make strategizing part of BAU (business as usual), you can focus on the activities that have the most impact (i.e., those that actually move you closer to your goals and vision). 

2. Optimize your budget allocation

A well-defined strategy clarifies how to use your resources best . With careful planning, you can determine the crucial activities that will contribute to your strategic objectives. It’s good to tie your budget to your goals in this way, as it helps get more value from your resources and minimize wasted spending.

3. Foster stronger team culture

Without meaning, there is no motivation. Strategic planning gives people a shared “why” when it comes to their work . With improved communication from the top-down and bottom-up, a plan offers more context to help employees understand how their actions impact the company vision. This human-centric collaboration motivates people to be effective, keeping everyone engaged and focused on their role.

These terms are intrinsically connected but encompass distinctly different aspects of the overarching mission: to accomplish your long-term goals. 

Here’s the difference:

  • Strategic planning is the process that defines the direction of an organization (e.g., its long-term vision, mission, goals, and priorities).
  • Strategic management includes strategic planning and builds on it with activities, plans, and decisions the organization must undertake to achieve the defined goals. 

In short: strategic planning is what a business wants to do, whereas strategic management includes how it will happen.

Strategic management is one step ahead of strategic planning. The concept includes planning for the unknown contingencies in business, like shifts in the external environment such as a surprise pandemic or change in consumer interests (those fickle creatures!).

When Lego faced bankruptcy in 2003 , the CEO admitted he feared the company wouldn't survive. Over 70 years of market dominance had ingrained the Danish toy manufacturer in global culture.

Then, suddenly, the beloved brand was on the brink of ruin. Thankfully, some tremendous strategic management helped Lego pivot to AR/VR experiences. Today, the brand continues to soar with annual revenues close to $6 billion . 

There are hundreds of models for strategic planning. Many popular strategic planning processes are good in theory but useless in practice.

Let's look at a more straightforward, effective way to write a strategic plan. Our approach to strategic planning keeps the demands for flexibility and scalability in mind.

There are six core elements for your strategic plan:

Cascade-model-image

  • Vision: The ultimate goal and reason for your plan. This goal should be nearly unachievable.
  • Values: The core beliefs that unite everyone to pursue your vision.
  • Focus Areas: The key campaigns that everyone will focus on to drive progress.
  • Objectives: The specific activities and targets within focus areas. These targets have deadlines.
  • Projects: The action plans for how to achieve the objectives.
  • KPIs: The means to measure your progress through metrics and timelines.

Imagine a plan where every individual knows their role — every team has a clear step-by-step playbook.

Every month you make your targets and every quarter you take leaps and bounds toward your shared goals. Everything is in sync and everyone is on board. 

That scenario is what a great strategy plan can deliver. The Cascade Strategy Model is designed to be execution-ready.

We’ve based the design on a wealth of experience where we’ve tried and tested the model to deliver success for our clients far beyond the strategic planning phase. 

💡 Tip: If you feel ready to create your own strategic plan, pick your strategy plan template from our list of most used and free templates in our strategy library. 

📚 Want to learn more about how to write a strategic plan in 2022? Check out our guide to learn more about the Cascade Strategy Model.

When you want to take that elusive next step and succeed with strategy execution, there are a few things you must never forget.

critical-principles-for-strategic-planning-success-infographic

Strategy is for everyone

Your management committee might be tempted to close the doors and brainstorm a strategic plan in private — but this would be a mistake. Old strategies die in endless boardroom meetings . 

Strategy is a team effort, not a C-suite game for the big wigs in the boardroom. Management must involve the entire organization in cross-department collaboration from top to bottom. 

Giving your employees a voice in your strategy helps strengthen the company's internal relationships. As you build your company vision together, you empower your employees to be active contributors to the greater cause.

Provide easy access to the strategic plan

When you have your strategy plan ready for action, it's essential to store it somewhere everyone can access. After all, strategy is everybody’s business and shouldn’t be under lock and key, guarded by a three-headed dog.

Different teams have different roles and they'll need to regularly refer to the master plan to ensure they all row in the same direction. Cascade’s strategy execution platform provides dashboards for every team and displays all business performance together.

With ready-made reports, every employee has access to real-time data, getting the insights they need to make the right decisions at every stage.

Plan with strategy implementation in mind

Last but not least, this next point is arguably the most critical aspect of successful strategic planning.

You must create a strategic plan with execution in mind . After all, strategy without execution is just a hypothesis. A successful strategy is not just about the plan — it’s about the execution on the ground. Done right, your strategy will enable you to dream bigger and execute better so you can achieve the most ambitious goals.

For that vision to become a reality, you must think about what needs to happen at every stage. Think about who will be responsible, how you will track it, and how you measure success.

Here are five questions your team must consider when you create a strategic plan:

  • Is it too complicated? You don't want to confuse people with complex terminology and excessive steps or actions. Make sure the plan is easy to understand, making it easy to turn ideas into implementation.
  • Is it scalable? Many strategic planning models are a good fit for smaller businesses but don't work so well with larger organizations with multiple teams or rapid growth.
  • Is it flexible? A rigid model will force people into unnecessary steps, which adds to their workload and frustration. A more flexible strategy will save time and drive meaningful work. 
  • Is it measurable? It’s crucial to be able to track metrics and determine whether your efforts are successful. Without a way to gauge success, your strategy will struggle to stay on course.
  • Is it adaptable? If there's anything we've learned from the pandemic, it's that the landscape can shift rapidly. Design your strategy to be incredibly adaptable so you can move with the market changes.

Keep implementation in mind to devise a strategic plan that’s easier to carry out in the future. With strategy execution software , you can plan and measure efforts across your organization to ensure progress from every team.

Get your hands dirty: Start planning your strategy

Strategy is not what it once was — a top-down practice or Powerpoint presentation without a long-term plan of action. Most traditional strategy models fail because they don't consider the multiple layers in the organization or the need to bring everyone together. 

Strategic planning is a powerful initiative to help everyone understand where your organization wants to go and precisely how to get there. However, it will only work when everyone is on board.

Whether it's a five-person startup or a 5,000-strong enterprise, executing a successful strategy relies on an inclusive, human-centric approach that involves your entire organization.

You must think about the needs of everyone in the company, consider external factors, plus focus on context and alignment between teams, goals, and everyday actions.

With collaboration at the heart of your strategy formulation , you can create a flexible, scalable, strategic framework that is easy to understand, implement, and measure.

Ultimately, this approach will help unite your employees under a single vision so everyone can help push the company to reach its goals.

Are you ready to fast-track your strategic planning process for the next year? Download our free ready-to-go strategic planning template that guides you from vision to results.

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Strategic Planning Process: 7 Crucial Steps to Success

a transparent grid illustration connecting a circle and square representing the strategic planning process

What to read next:

Playing chess without a strong opening is a guaranteed way to disadvantage yourself. Just like in chess, organizations without an adequate strategic planning process are unlikely to thrive and adapt long-term. 

The strategic planning process is essential for aligning your organization on key priorities, goals, and initiatives, making it crucial for organizational success.   

This article will empower you to craft and perfect your strategic planning process by exploring the following:  

  • What is strategic planning
  • Why strategic planning is important for your business  
  • The seven steps of the strategic planning process   

Strategic planning frameworks

  • Best practices supporting the strategic planning process  

By the end of this article, you’ll have the knowledge needed to perfect the key elements of strategic planning. Ready? Let’s begin.  

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning charts your business's course toward success. Using your organization’s vision, mission, and values — with internal and external information — each step of the strategic planning process helps you craft long-term objectives and attain your goals with strategic management.  

The key elements of strategic planning includes a SWOT analysis, goal setting , stakeholder involvement, plus developing actionable strategies, approaches, and tactics aligned with primary objectives.  

In short, the strategic planning process bridges the gap between your organization’s current and desired state, providing a clear and actionable framework that answers:   Where are you now?   Where do you want to be?   How will you get there?

7 key elements of strategic planning 

The following strategic planning components work together to create cohesive strategic plans for your business goals. Let’s take a close look at each of these:  

  • Vision : What your organization wants to achieve in the future, the long-term goal  
  • Mission : The driving force behind why your company exists, who it serves, and how it creates value  
  • Values : Fundamental beliefs guiding your company’s decision-making process  
  • Goals : Measurable objectives in alignment with your business mission, vision, and values  
  • Strategy : A long-term strategy map for achieving your objectives based on both internal and external factors  
  • Approach : How you execute strategy and achieve objectives using actions and initiatives   
  • Tactics : Granular short-term actions, programs, and activities  

Why a concrete strategic planning is important

Just as a chess player needs a gameplan to reach checkmate, a company needs a solid strategic plan to achieve its goals.   

Without a strategic plan, your business will waste precious time, energy, and resources on endeavors that won’t get your company closer to where it needs to be.   

Your ideal plan should cover all key strategic planning areas, while allowing you to stay present by measuring success and course-correcting or redefining the strategic direction when necessary. Ultimately, enabling your company to stay future-proof through the creation of an always-on strategy.   

An always-on strategy involves continuous environmental scanning even after the strategic plan has been devised, ensuring readiness to adapt in response to quick, drastic changes in the environment.

Let’s dive deeper into the steps of the strategic planning process.  

What are the 7 stages of the strategic planning process?

You understand the overall value of implementing a strategic planning process — now let’s put it in practice. Here's our 7-step approach to strategic planning that ensures everyone is on the same page:  

  • Clarify your vision, mission, and values  
  • Conduct an environmental scan  
  • Define strategic priorities  
  • Develop goals and metrics  
  • Derive a strategic plan  
  • Write and communicate your strategic plan  
  • Implement, monitor, and revise   

1. Clarify your vision, mission, and values 

The first step of the strategic planning process is understanding your organization’s core elements: vision, mission, and values. Clarifying these will align your strategic plan with your company’s definition of success. Once established, these are the foundation for the rest of the strategic planning process.   

Questions to ask:

  • What do we aspire to achieve in the long term?
  • What is our purpose or ultimate goal?
  • What do we do to fulfill our vision?
  • What key activities or services do we provide?
  • What are our organization's ethics?
  • What qualities or behaviors do we expect from employees?

Read more: What is Mission vs. Vision  

A green flag with hollow filling placed to the left of an outline of an eye, with the iris also outlined in green, all on a green background, to signal mission vs. vision

2. Conduct an environmental scan

Once everyone on the same page about vision, mission, and values, it's time to scan your internal and external environment. This involves a long-term SWOT analysis, evaluating your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  

Internal factors 

Internal strengths and weaknesses help you understand where your organization excels and what it could improve. Strengths and weaknesses awareness helps make more informed decisions with your capabilities and resource allocation in mind.  

External factors

Externally, opportunities and threats in the market help you understand the power of your industry’s customers, suppliers, and competitors. Additionally, consider how broader forces like technology, culture, politics, and regulation may impact your organization.   

  • What are our organization's key strengths or competitive advantages?
  • What areas or functions within our organization need improvement?
  • What emerging trends or opportunities can we leverage?
  • How do changes in technology, regulations, or consumer behavior impact us?

3. Define strategic priorities

Prioritization puts the “strategic” in strategic planning process. Your organization’s mission, vision, values, and environmental scan serve as a lens to identify top priorities. Limiting priorities ensures your organization intentionally allocates resources.  

These categories can help you rank your strategic priorities:  

  • Critical : Urgent tasks whose failure to complete will have severe consequences — financial losses, reputation damage, or legal consequences  
  • Important : Significant tasks which support organizational achievements and require timely completion  
  • Desirable : Valuable tasks not essential in the short-term, but can contribute to long-term success and growth  
  • How do these priorities align with our mission, vision, and values?
  • Which tasks need to be completed quickly to ensure effective progress towards our desired outcomes?
  • What resources and capabilities do we need to pursue these priorities effectively?

4. Develop goals and metrics

Next, you establish goals and metrics to reflect your strategic priorities. Purpose-driven, long-term, actionable strategic planning goals should flow down through the organization, with lower-level goals contributing to higher-level ones.  

One approach that can help you set and measure your aligned goals is objectives and key results (OKRs). OKRs consist of objectives, qualitative statements of what you want to achieve, and key results, 3-5 supporting metrics that track progress toward your objective.  

OKRs ensure alignment at every level of the organization, with tracking and accountability built into the framework to keep everyone engaged. With ambitious, intentional goals, OKRs can help you drive the strategic plan forward.  

  • What metrics can we use to track progress toward each objective?
  • How can we ensure that lower-level goals and metrics support and contribute to higher-level ones?
  • How will we track and measure progress towards key results?
  • How will we ensure accountability?

Get an in-depth look at OKRs with our Ultimate OKR Playbook

an illustration of a circle in a shifting square to represent an okr playbook

5. Derive a strategic plan

The next step of the strategic planning process gets down to the nitty-gritty “how” — outlining a clear, practical plan for bridging the gap between now and the future.   

To do this, you’ll need to brainstorm short- and long-term approaches to achieving the goals you’ve set, answering a couple of key questions along the way. You must evaluate ideas based on factors like:  

  • Feasibility : How realistic and achievable is it?  
  • Impact : How conducive is it to goal attainment?  
  • Cost : Can we fund this approach, and is it worth the investment?  
  • Alignment : Does it support our mission, vision, and values?  

From your approaches, you can devise a detailed action plan, which covers things like:  

  • Timelines : When will we take each step, and what are the deadlines?  
  • Milestones : What key achievements will ensure consistent progress?  
  • Resource requirements : What’s needed to achieve each step?  
  • Responsibilities : Who's accountable in each step?  
  • Risks and challenges : What can affect our ability to execute our plan? How will we address these?  

With a detailed action plan like this, you can move from abstract goals to concrete steps, bringing you closer to achieving your strategic objectives.  

6. Write and communicate your strategic plan

Writing and communicating your strategic plan involves everyone, ensuring each team is on the same page. Here’s a clear, concise structure you can use to cover the most important strategic planning components:  

  • Executive summary : Highlights and priorities in your strategic overview   
  • Introduction : Background on your strategic plan  
  • Connection : How your strategic plan aligns with your organization’s mission, vision, and values  
  • Environmental scan : An overview of your SWOT analysis findings  
  • Strategic priorities and goals : Informed short and long-term organizational goals  
  • Strategic approach : An overview of your tactical plan   
  • Resource needs : How you'll deploy technology, funding, and employees  
  • Risk and challenges : How you’ll mitigate the unknowns if and when they arise  
  • Implementation plan : A step-by-step resource deployment plan for achieving your strategy  
  • Monitoring and evaluation : How you’ll keep your plan heading in the right direction  
  • Conclusion : A summary of the strategic plan and everything it entails  
  • What information or context do stakeholders need to understand the strategic plan?
  • How can we emphasize the connection between the strategic plan and the overall purpose and direction of the organization?
  • What initiatives or strategies will we implement to drive progress?
  • How will we mitigate or address risks?
  • What are the specific steps and actions we need to take to implement the strategic plan?
  • Any additional information or next steps we need to communicate?

7. Implement, monitor, and revise performance 

Finally, it’s time to implement your strategic plan, making sure it's up to date, creating a persistent, always-on strategy that doesn't lag behind. As you get the ball rolling, keep a close eye on your timelines, milestones, and performance targets, and whether these align with your internal and external environment.   

Internally, indicators like completions, issues, and delays provide visibility into your process. If any bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or misalignment arises, take corrective action promptly — adjust the plan, reallocate resources, or provide additional training to employees.  

Externally, you should monitor changes such as customer preferences, competitive pressures, economic shifts , and regulatory changes. These impact the success of your strategic action plan and may require tweaks along the way.   

Remember, implementing a strategic plan isn’t a one-time task — continual evaluation is essential for an always-on strategy. It involves extending beyond planning stages and contextualizing the strategy in real-time, allowing for swift adaptations to changing circumstances to ensure your plan remains relevant.

  • Are there any bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or misalignments we need to address?
  • Are we monitoring and analyzing external factors?
  • Are we prepared to make necessary tweaks or adaptations along the way?
  • Are we agile enough to promptly correct deviations from our strategic plan while maintaining an "always-on" strategy for continual adjustments?

You can use several frameworks to guide you through the strategic planning process. Some of the most influential ones include:

  • Balanced scorecard (BSC) : Takes an overarching approach to strategic planning, covering financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth, aligning short-term operational tasks with long-term strategic goals.
  • SWOT analysis : Highlights your business's internal strengths and weaknesses alongside external opportunities and threats to enable informed decisions about your strategic direction.
  • OKRs : Structures goals as a set of measurable objectives and key results. They cascade down from top-level organizational objectives to lower-level team goals, ensuring alignment across the entire organization. Get an in-depth look at OKRs here . 
  • Scenario planning : Involves envisioning and planning for various possible future scenarios, allowing you to prepare for a range of potential outcomes. It's particularly useful in volatile environments rife with uncertainties.
  • Porter's five forces : Evaluates the competitive forces within your industry — rivalry among existing competitors, bargaining power of buyers and suppliers, threat of new entrants, and threat of substitutes — to shape strategies that position the organization for success.

Common problems with strategic planning and how to overcome them

While strategic planning provides a roadmap for business success, it's not immune to challenges. Recognizing and addressing these is crucial for effective strategy implementation. Let's explore common issues encountered in strategic planning and strategies to overcome them.

Static nature

Traditional strategic planning models often follow a linear, annual, and inflexible process that doesn't accommodate quick changes in the business landscape. Strategies formulated this way may quickly become outdated in today's fast-paced environment.

To overcome the rigidity of traditional strategic planning, your organization should integrate continuous environmental scanning processes. This includes monitoring market changes, competitor actions, and technological advancements, ensuring real-time insights inform strategic decision-making. Additionally, adopting agile methodologies allows for iterative planning, breaking down strategies into smaller, manageable components reviewed and adjusted regularly, ensuring adaptability in today's fast-paced landscape.

Disconnect between strategic plan and execution

There's often a significant gap between the strategic objectives and their actual implementation, leading to misalignment, confusion, and inefficiency within the organization.

To bridge the gap, ensure accountability, alignment, and feedback-driven processes across the business. Linking team roles and responsibilities to lower-level objectives can fosters alignment and accountability, whereas aligning these with overarching strategic objectives ensure coherence in execution. To ensure goals are optimized on an ongoing basis, implement a feedback mechanism that continuously evaluates progress against goals, enabling regular adjustments based on market feedback and internal insights.

Lack of real-time insights

Traditional planning models rely on historical data and periodic reviews, which might not capture real-time changes or emerging trends accurately. This can result in misaligned strategies unsuitable for the current business landscape.

Leverage advanced analytics tools and AI-driven technologies. Invest in technologies that offer real-time tracking and reporting of key performance indicators, with dashboards and monitoring systems that provide up-to-date insights. These allow you to gather, process, and interpret real-time data for proactive decision-making that aligns with the current business landscape. 

Failure to close the feedback loop

The absence of a feedback loop between strategy formulation, execution, and evaluation can impact learning and improvement. Companies might therefore struggle to refine their strategies based on real-time performance insights.

Establish a structured feedback loop encompassing strategy formulation, execution, and evaluation stages. Encourage employees to actively contribute insights on strategy execution, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptation.

Best practices during the strategic planning process

Navigating strategic planning goes beyond overcoming challenges. A successful strategic plan requires you to embrace a set of guiding best practices, helping you navigate the development and implementation of your strategic planning process.   

1. Keep the planning process flexible

With ever-changing business environments, a one-and-done approach to strategic planning is insufficient. Your strategic plan needs to be adaptable to ensure its relevancy and its ability to weather the effects of changing circumstances.  

2. Pull together a diverse group of stakeholders

By including voices from across the organization, you can account for varying thoughts, perspectives, and experiences at each step of the strategic planning process, ensuring cross-functional alignment .  

3. Document the process

Continuous documentation of the strategic management process is crucial in capturing and communicating the key elements of strategic planning. This keeps everyone on the same page and your strategic plan up-to-date and relevant.  

4. Make data-driven decisions

Root your decisions in evidence and facts rather than assumptions or opinions. This cultivates accurate insights, improves prioritization, and reduces biased (flawed) decisions.  

5. Align your company culture with the strategic plan 

Your strategic plan can only be successful if everyone is on board with it — company culture supports what you’re trying to achieve. Behaviors, rules, and attitudes optimize the execution of your strategic plan.  

6. Leverage AI 

Using AI in strategic planning supports the development of an always-on strategy — amplifying strategic agility, conducting comprehensive environmental scans, and expediting planning phases. It can streamline operations, facilitate data-driven decision-making, and provide transparent insights into progress to drive accountability, engagement, and alignment with the strategic plan.

The strategic planning process in a nutshell

Careful strategy mapping is crucial for any organization looking to achieve its long-term goals while staying true to its mission, vision, and values. The seven steps in the strategic planning process outlined in this article provide a solid framework your organization can follow — from clarifying your organization’s purpose and developing a strategic plan, to implementing, monitoring, and revising performance. These steps will help your company meet goal measurements and create an always-on strategy that's rooted in the present. 

It’s important to remember that strategic planning is not a one-time event. To stay effective and relevant, you must continuously monitor and adapt your strategy in response to changing circumstances. This ongoing process of improvement keeps your organization competitive and demonstrates your commitment to achieving your goals.  

  Quantive is your bridge between strategy and execution. Founded on the objectives and key results (OKR) methodology, our Strategy Execution solution is where businesses plan successful strategy, focus and align teams to it, and stay on the leading edge of progress.  

As your company looks to achieve the best possible results, you need a modern approach to run your business and change your business. The Modern Operating Model brings strategy, teams, and data together to help make decisions faster, optimize operations, and drive better business outcomes.  

Whether you’re a large enterprise facing competitive disruption or a small business leading the innovative charge, Quantive helps get you where you want to go.  

Ready to achieve the best possible? Start your free trial today. 

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Strategy execution in 4 steps: keys to successful strategy, how top companies are closing the strategy execution gap, 7 best practices for strategy execution, why your business needs strategy execution software, subscribe for our newsletter.

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How to Develop a Business Strategy: 6 Steps

colleagues developing a business strategy using sticky notes on glass window

  • 25 Oct 2022

Business strategy can seem daunting, and for good reason: It can make or break an organization. Yet, developing a strong strategy doesn’t need to be overwhelming.

In the online course Business Strategy , Harvard Business School Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee posits that strategy is simple. His secret? Focus on your organization’s value creation.

“Strategy often sounds like a lofty concept that only the most senior executives can develop,” Oberholzer-Gee says. “But actually, anyone can think and act strategically. It doesn’t need to be difficult; all you need is a proven framework.”

Here’s a breakdown of why business strategy is important, the basics of value-based strategy, and six steps for developing your own.

Why Do You Need a Business Strategy?

Business strategy is the development, alignment, and integration of an organization’s strategic initiatives to give it a competitive edge in the market. Devising a business strategy can ensure you have a clear plan for reaching organizational goals and continue to survive and thrive.

According to a study by Bridges Business Consultancy , 48 percent of organizations fail to meet half of their strategic targets and 85 percent fail to meet two-thirds, highlighting why dedication to the business strategy process is crucial.

One type of business strategy is called value-based strategy, which simplifies the process by leveraging the value stick framework to focus on the advantage your business creates.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Value-Based Strategy?

Value-based strategy , also called value-based pricing, is a pricing method in which an organization relies on the perceived value of its goods and services to determine its pricing structure and resource allocation.

The value stick framework can be used to visualize how various factors impact each other and determine which initiatives to pursue to increase value for all parties.

The value stick framework

The value stick has four factors:

  • Willingness to pay (WTP) : The highest price a customer is willing to pay for your product or service
  • Price : The amount customers have to pay for goods or services
  • Cost : The amount a company spends on producing goods or services
  • Willingness to sell (WTS) : The lowest amount suppliers are willing to accept for the materials required to produce goods or services

To determine how to best create value, you can toggle each factor on the value stick to see how the others are affected. For instance, lowering price increases customer delight.

"As strategists, we really ask three questions,” Oberholzer-Gee says in Business Strategy. “How can my business best create value for customers? How can my business create value for employees? And how can my business create value by collaborating with suppliers? Think of a company's strategy as an answer to these three questions."

Related: 4 Business Strategy Skills Every Business Leader Needs

6 Steps to Develop a Value-Based Business Strategy

1. define your purpose.

When approaching business strategy, defining your organization’s purpose can be a useful starting point.

This is vital in creating customer and employee value, especially if your organization’s purpose is linked to a cause such as environmental protection or alleviating specific social issues.

A recent survey conducted by clean energy company Swytch found that nearly 75 percent of millennials would take a decrease in salary if it meant working for an environmentally responsible company. Nearly 40 percent selected one job over another because of an organization’s sustainability practices.

Additionally, research in the Harvard Business Review shows that consumers’ motivation to buy from sustainable brands is on the rise. Sales of products marked as sustainable grew more than five times faster than those that weren’t.

By starting with purpose, your organization can create more value down the line.

2. Assess Market Opportunity

Next, understand your market’s competitive landscape. Which companies own shares of the market? What differentiates your competitors’ products from yours? Are there any unmet needs your organization could take advantage of?

Conducting this research before planning a strategy is critical in identifying how your organization provides unique customer value and opportunities to create even more.

3. Create Value for Customers

With an understanding of the market and your company’s purpose, you can determine how your organization provides unique or greater value and strategize ways to improve.

On the value stick, the value captured by customers is called “customer delight.” It can be increased by raising their willingness to pay and decreasing the product’s price. If lowering the price isn’t an option, brainstorm how you could make the product more valuable to customers, thus increasing their willingness to pay.

Some ways to create customer value include:

  • Lowering the product’s price
  • Increasing the product’s physical quality and longevity
  • Providing quick, high-quality customer service and a smooth shopping experience
  • Leveraging network effects , if applicable, to create a community of users
  • Incorporating an environmental or social cause into processes, packaging, and branding

4. Create Value for Suppliers

In addition to creating value for customers, you also need to provide value for suppliers. Suppliers can include any company that provides raw materials, labor, and transportation to help your organization produce goods or deliver services.

Supplier surplus, also called supplier delight, is created when the cost of materials increases or their willingness to sell decreases. The relationship between a firm and its suppliers can be contentious, given that both want to increase their margins. Yet, there are ways to create value for both parties.

Some ways to create value for suppliers include:

  • Agreeing to pay more for higher quality materials : While this increases the supplier surplus, it may also increase customer delight by raising willingness to pay, or increase the firm’s margin by allowing you to raise prices.
  • Working with the supplier to increase efficiency : This strategy can increase supplier surplus by lowering the overall cost of the supplier’s labor and their willingness to sell.

Business Strategy | Simplify Strategy to Make the Greatest Business Impact | Learn More

5. Create Value for Employees

Creating value for employees is a critical part of an effective business strategy and can be assessed using the value stick. Think of your employees as the “supplier” of labor and the supplier margin as employee satisfaction.

Employee satisfaction can be increased by raising wages or lowering the minimum salary they’re willing to receive by delivering value in other ways. Satisfied employees may provide a better customer experience, resulting in increased customer delight.

The value you provide employees ensures they’re motivated to do their best work, develop their skills, and stay with your company long-term.

Some examples of ways to create value for your employees include:

  • Offering competitive salaries and bonuses
  • Offering benefits like ample paid vacation and sick days, generous parental leave, and wellness budgets
  • Providing flexibility of work location, whether your team is fully remote or hybrid
  • Aiding in professional development
  • Creating a workplace rich with a diversity of experiences, identities, and ideas
  • Fostering a supportive organizational culture

One example from Business Strategy is that of a call center for a diagnostics company. The employees were being paid minimum wage and expressed that the analytical nature of their phone calls with customers warranted higher pay. They also expressed pain points about cumbersome tasks and work conditions.

When a pay increase was implemented for all employees, along with operational changes to make processes smoother, employee productivity increased to the point that it balanced out the higher cost of salaries.

Because the employees’ satisfaction increased, they also began providing better experiences on the phone with customers. This increased the customers’ willingness to pay, directly impacting customer delight.

6. Map Strategy to Actionable Tasks and KPIs

Amidst creating value for each of the three groups, don’t forget the fourth party that needs value: your company. By creating value for employees, suppliers, and customers, you’re creating value for your firm, too.

To ensure you’re tracking to goals, determine your key performance indicators, what metrics constitute success, and how you’ll report results over time. Then, break each of the above value-creation goals into action items. For instance, what steps can you take to increase your employees’ compensation? Who will be responsible for each task?

Having actionable assignments and clear metrics for success will allow for a smooth transition from strategy formulation to execution.

Which HBS Online Strategy Course is Right for You? | Download Your Free Flowchart

Building Your Strategic Skill Set

By leveraging the value stick, you can create a business strategy that provides value to employees, customers, suppliers, and your firm.

To develop your strategies further and dig deeper into how to navigate value creation, consider taking an online course like Business Strategy . Professor Oberholzer-Gee walks through real-world examples of business challenges, prompts you to consider how you’d create value, and then reveals what those business leaders did and how you can apply the lessons to your organization.

Want to learn more about how to craft a successful strategy for your organization? Explore Business Strategy , one of our online strategy courses , to learn how to create organizational value. Not sure which course is the right fit? Download our free flowchart .

steps involved in a strategic plan

About the Author

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How to Strategic Plan in 7 Steps

By Avery Collins, GSA

April 26, 2022

This is the second post in a series highlighting different aspects of strategic planning in the Federal Government. Today, we will meet Agency Alpha, a fictional agency that will help us learn more about the strategic planning process.

L ast week, we met Carson and learned how she used strategic planning to land a new job . We talked about how this same process applies to government agencies and leaders, who use strategic planning to determine their vision for the future and create a strategic plan to serve as their roadmap.

The strategic planning process that agencies follow is more in-depth than most of us use for our personal goals. Today we will be following Agency Alpha, a fictional federal agency that will help illustrate the strategic planning process. While each federal agency approaches strategic planning a little differently and there is not a single best approach, a sound strategic planning process includes the following 7 key steps.

Step 1: Environmental Scan

The first step of any strategic planning process starts with research. Agency Alpha conducts an environmental scan , a process where they identify and monitor factors that may impact the long-term direction of the agency. Agency Alpha starts by looking at the incoming administration’s priorities and potential new regulations. They identify climate change, customer experience, and equity as a few Administration priorities that they would need to incorporate into their future vision.

Step 2: Internal Analysis

Research doesn’t stop after assessing the environment outside of an agency. Agency Alpha also needs to complete an internal analysis , including a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) assessment. They utilize their annual review process to evaluate performance across the agency and engage with staff and senior leadership. They compare their operations with the Administration priorities they identified in step 1, and in this instance they focus specifically on climate.

Step 3: Strategic Direction

Agency Alpha uses what they learned from their environmental scan and internal analysis to create a strategic direction . They meet with staff and stakeholders and use that input to build a vision for the future that is both idealistic and high-impact. They theorize how to align Administration priorities like equity, customer experience, and climate with agency operations. They determine what is actually achievable and what the agency should strive for. Climate is important to the agency employees and those they serve. They see it as a big part of the future, and thus a big part of the vision for Agency Alpha.

Step 4: Develop Goals and Objectives

After determining their strategic direction and vision, Agency Alpha engages with internal stakeholders and senior leadership to create a focused set of goals and objectives . They facilitate focus groups and meet with subject matter experts to come up with strategies, indicators, and desired outcomes for each goal. They use existing processes like staff engagement, communities of practice, and quarterly reviews to get buy-in from across the agency.

Step 5: Define Metrics, Set Timelines, and Track Progress

After the goals and objectives are set, Agency Alpha adds details to their plan. They determine the responsible offices and bureaus for each goal. They identify the necessary resource allocations, create actionable timeframes, and define metrics that best measure success. Agency Alpha appoints Team Beta to lead clean energy initiatives and Team Cobra to lead climate literacy initiatives. They set milestones and timelines to ensure they stay on track.

Step 6: Write and Publish a Strategic Plan

Once Agency Alpha gathers the information in step 5, they write an informed strategic plan that captures the voice and purpose of the agency. Their engagement with staff and stakeholders in steps 2 through 5 gained agency-wide support for the plan to help ensure that the strategic plan does not end up as a stand-alone document.

Step 7: Plan for Implementation and the Future

While drafting their plan, Agency Alpha begins to prepare for how to implement it after publication. They include performance measures that track progress and create a formal system for leadership and staff to annually review the plan and update goals and objectives as needed. Every agency follows a slightly different process, but most have gone through these 7 steps over the last year and a half. Last month, federal agencies published their strategic plans for 2022 to 2026 on performance.gov .

Stay tuned as we explore the importance of strategy and performance in the Federal Government and share agency success stories. The next post in this series will feature the National Endowment for the Arts and look at how staff and external engagement shaped their overall vision for the next four years.

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7 Essential Steps in Strategic Planning

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steps involved in a strategic plan

What is Strategic Planning?

Think of strategic planning as a company’s roadmap for success. It lays out a plan for moving forward, sets milestones to reach along the way, and tracks the progress of those milestones. When done effectively, strategic planning can give your company a sense of direction, reveal ways to improve performance, and rally everyone around a common goal.

As a future leader , learning how to develop a strategic plan can provide lasting value to your organization—and it’s one of the important skills you’ll learn in a business degree program .

What are the Steps of Strategic Planning?

Creating a strategic plan is a multi-step process in which one step builds off the other. Here are seven steps to consider:

1. Establish Your Strategic Position

Positioning is a fundamental step of the strategic planning process. Its purpose is to clearly define what sets your organization—and the product or services it offers—apart from the competition.

Strategic positioning is a team effort that typically involves stakeholders of the organization’s finance, marketing, and sales departments. It requires decision making about priorities, what value your products and services offer customers, and how they'll be made and marketed by your company.

Laying out a strategic position involves two things:

  • Determining the kind of value your product will offer to your consumers
  • Deciding how that value will be created differently from your competition

These decisions help lay the foundation for how your organization will operate and inform the strategic choices that will be made in your planning process.

2. Identify Objectives

Strategic planning is all about establishing a roadmap for success, and objectives are the mileposts that determine whether your organization is on the right path. Objectives are clear, measurable goals that are communicated in terms of quantities and timelines. This can be part of a mission statement, a vision statement, or a business plan.

There are multiple ways to set and measure goals. One popular way is using key performance indicators, also known as KPIs. KPIs are measurable values that set a standard for success and track a company’s effectiveness in achieving its objectives.

An effective KPI should follow the SMART goal-setting framework, which means it needs to be:

  • Specific: An effective KPI should be detailed, simple, and clear. For example, “Improve sales” is too broad.
  • Measurable: KPIs need to be measured quantifiably, whether that’s in dollar amounts, percentages, or raw numbers.
  • Achievable: Ensure your KPI is actually attainable and that your organization has the resources to support it.
  • Relevant: Make sure your KPI aligns with a larger business objective.
  • Time-bound: Good goals have a timeline that’s both ambitious yet realistic.

In addition to being SMART, objectives in a business plan should also:

  • Line up with your company’s overall vision. Any objectives you create should be cross-checked with your mission, vision, and values to confirm they’re all aligned.
  • Consider potential risks. Companies are often exposed to a variety of risks related to the development and implementation of their business strategy. When creating new objectives, it’s important to ensure your company is being as safe as possible and taking into account the likelihood of a financial, physical, or technological problem.

3. Analyze the Industry, Competitor, and Customer Trends

To create the most effective strategic plan for your organization, you need to fully understand the landscape you’re working in. This is known as an industry analysis. A thorough analysis plan helps you take a deep dive into your industry, consumers, competition, and potential trends within your niche. You can analyze your competitive advantage, business model, strategic objectives, and long-term goals. This can empower everyone, from employees to board members, to know the best steps to take in every area of the company. 

The data gained from industry analysis can help identify how your organization measures up against its competition. It can also point out potential threats to your organization, as well as opportunities. Armed with this information, you’ll be better equipped to plan for the future of your business.

But how do you conduct an industry analysis?

There are two common methods to consider:

  • A SWOT Analysis: SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This method helps you identify your company’s internal weaknesses and strengths and the external forces—like market trends—that could impact your business.
  • A PEST Analysis: An alternative to SWOT is a PEST analysis. This method pinpoints organizational threats and opportunities through the lens of Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors.

Industry analysis isn’t meant to be a one-and-done activity. It’s important to look into the competitive landscape on a regular basis so that your organization can continue to grow, improve, and find new ways to disrupt the market.

steps involved in a strategic plan

4. Create a Strategic Planning Team

Strategic planning can’t be done in a silo. Involving the right people in your organization will give you extra sets of eyes and expertise, ensuring that important details don’t slip through the cracks.

So, who should make up a strategic planning team?

Every team will look different based on your organization, but for starters, you can tap into managers from your finance, marketing, or HR departments. A team that has diverse ideas and perspectives will only strengthen yours. In fact, according to an article by Fierce Inc. , “Without diversity of thought, innovation is thwarted, initiatives may stall, and you alone cannot save your organization. You need to approach issues with a number of perspectives to be able to see the whole truth.”

With a diverse group of people on your planning team, you’ll know people from all sides of your organization are working together to push things forward.

5. Create an Actionable Plan

Now that you’ve established your strategic position, objectives, industry analysis, and a team to support it, it’s time to create a plan of action. An action plan is a series of steps that outline how your company will use its strategies to meet its goals.

This plan should clearly outline:

  • What action needs to happen
  • Who will carry it out
  • When it will be executed
  • What resources are needed to make it happen

There are many moving parts to this process, which is why utilizing a visual tool—such as a strategy map, can be beneficial. This map can help your team see the entire strategic planning method laid out in one simple visual.

6. Communicate Your Plan

The quickest way to sabotage your organization’s strategy is failing to communicate it. Research shows that, on average, 95% of a company’s employees don’t understand its strategy. To ensure your plan is successful, everyone in your organization needs to be aware of the how and why of your goals and what they can do to help reach them. This creates a united vision with everyone working together.

Because everyone absorbs information differently, it’s important to communicate your strategic plan in several different ways. For instance, if you only send out an e-newsletter, there’s a good chance some employees might not open it or even read the entire email. Instead, use a multi-channel approach such as:

  • A company-wide meeting
  • An announcement in your company newsletter or blog
  • A video from leadership breaking down the new strategy
  • A detailed handout passed out among employees or posted on a bulletin board

You should continue to communicate your strategy routinely (whether that’s every month or quarter) and keep your people in the know when there are changes or updates to the plan.

7. Assess and Revise the Plan Regularly

Once your strategy is launched, you’ll need to know how it’s working. After all, good planning is just part of the process. The other part is consistently checking in on how your organization is progressing toward its goals. A quarterly or monthly review with your strategy team is a good way to check in on your efforts. As you're reviewing your progress, see what worked and what didn’t. Also, look at whether you hit your numbers and deadlines. It’s common for a strategic plan to need some updates along the way, whether that’s revising the timeline, resources, or people working on the plan.

Remember, the strategic planning process is meant to be a constant work in progress. With a committed and communicative leadership team, your organization has a better chance of seeing its vision come to life.

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What is Strategic Planning? What are the Steps Involved in Creating a Strategic Plan?

strategic-planning

Category: Strategy , OKR University , BLOG .

Bright business ideas may come from anyone with the spirit of entrepreneurship, and it is relatively easy to determine the nature of business one may want to do. At the same time, it also brings out some of the most difficult questions including:

1. Where to start in the first place?

2. What is the vision?

3. How to get going?

4. What are the objectives?

5. What all needs to be done to achieve the objectives? and

6. How to run this business successfully in a growth trajectory?

Without the answers to all these questions, it is impossible to take even one step in the right direction and go forward. Running an organization without a vision and a strong set of guiding principles, to show the way toward reaching that vision, is akin to navigating a ship without a compass. Even an established company may need to revisit them often, as the priorities of the organization change with time and constant course correction is inevitable.

Strategic planning is the compass that helps you navigate your business in the right direction.

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the process of formulating a vision for the organization, identifying the goals and establishing a roadmap to realize these goals and achieve the vision of the organization. It focuses solely on mid-to long-term goals that can be attained over a long period of time, rather than determining details such as short-term goals, project planning and daily activities of the organization.

-type-of-strategic-plans

Types of strategic plans

Strategic planning is carried out in three different areas. Strategic plans can be categorized into:

1. Business strategy: A strategic plan around the business involves creating vision and mission statements based on external factors such as market conditions and business environment, formulating broader organizational objectives and allocating all kinds of resources for the successful fulfillment of the business objectives. It also involves assessing the strengths of the organization and identifying avenues of innovation, predicting the potential opportunities that may arise in the future, and devising ways to achieve growth and competitive advantage in the long run.

2. Corporate strategy: A strategic plan that is built around the corporate lays down the guidelines for the functioning of the organization. It organizes the business structure and puts in place the processes that help the leadership make all the teams and individuals across all hierarchies of the organization work in synergy and realize everyone’s potential.

For instance, some organizations have a dedicated innovation team to solve problems and come up with ideas that address the target audience’s pain points. They do not have exact time frames to come up with ideas. The innovative ideas and concepts they come up with are discussed with the R&D team to refine the ideas and incorporate those innovations into a proof of concept/prototype. They finally reach out to the product team to create a financially viable, marketable product. Due to the nature of their work, these three teams operate at different speeds, timelines and with varying budget constraints. A corporate strategic plan connects them through well-defined processes and policies to work together, produce outcomes notwithstanding their differences, and release successful products at the right time to meet the organization’s overall objectives. Using an agile OKR process to drive the corporate strategy will help bridge the strategy execution gap. Organizations must include an OKR strategy to help realize their goals.

3. Functional strategy: Functional strategy is about laying out department-level processes and guidelines, which are a minor component of the broader corporate strategy.

Looking to bridge the strategy execution gap? You can get started on Profit.co completely free today!

Key Components of a strategic plan

A strategic plan may include various components and documents such as:

  • Vision statement that states the purpose of the organization
  • Mission Statement that denotes the aspirations and values of the organization
  • Objectives the organization collectively wants to achieve
  • Elevator pitch to clarify your action plan and the impact you want to make
  • A SWOT analysis that defines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the organization
  • KPIs by which you measure the performance of your strategy and goals
  • Industry Analysis that presents the current state of the business environment, market conditions, socio-political and economic factors relevant to your business, your competitors and their SWOT analysis
  • Operations Plan, which lists out operations, activities and tasks required to be completed by every team to meet the objectives
  • Financial projections that depict your current financial data and projections of the future potential
  • An executive summary that summarizes the report and shows a glimpse of the strategic plan

The cadence of strategic planning process

Strategic plans are constantly revisited as they are the guiding documents of the organization. They are periodically reviewed to adjust the goals and the broader strategy based on past performance and future requirements.

The cadence of strategic planning depends on the nature of the organization. For instance, some sectors, such as the tech industry, may go through massive changes quite frequently due to the rapid pace of development. So, these organizations may review their strategic plans on a quarterly basis. Sectors that don’t go through massive changes or see revolutionary innovations often, such as the education sector, may look into their strategic plans annually or every six months.

In addition to these periodic reviews and revisions, the strategic plan of an organization may also be reviewed and modified in the event of:

  • Changing market conditions that demand taking a new direction
  • The emergence of new industry standards, legal requirements, and regulations
  • Acquiring another company and merging its workforce and product portfolio
  • Expanding the business with new product launches
  • Venturing into a new branch of the business
  • Making changes in the organization’s leadership

7 Benefits of strategic planning

Strategic planning provides guidance to take the business forward towards reaching its goals. While planning provides the road map in order to reap the benefits of OKRs, organizations must identify and use agile OKR software to make sure their goals are realized. So, every aspect of a business is aligned and directly correlates with the organization’s strategy. This makes the strategic planning process extremely important for a business. Following are some benefits of strategic planning.

1. strategic planning helps to prepare for the future

Strategic planning helps assess the organization’s strengths and determine the opportunities it could seize in the future. It also helps to assess the risks, predict the challenges and proactively put in place mechanisms that could help the organization face them without resorting to finding ways to manage the risks and unexpected challenges only as they emerge.

2. Strategic planning unites the workforce with a common goal

By setting the overall objectives and determining what the organization wants to achieve in the long run, a strategic plan provides a sense of direction and drives the employees and teams towards common goals. It aligns them with a purpose and drives them to work together towards desired outcomes. It sets the standard by which all operations and functions should be carried out to achieve maximum efficiency and accountability.

3. A strategic plan helps to maintain focus

The day-to-day functioning of an organization may involve so many tasks and deadlines that it is easy for employees to get stuck in relatively less significant and mundane tasks, forgetting the organizational goals that they have to collectively achieve. The strategic plan helps to periodically review the progress against what the organization envisions, and constantly keep the employees back on track to prioritize the right things and work towards the long-term vision.

4. Strategic plan helps you innovate

Strategic plans provide the organization with a broad vision and direction in order to create value and shape the future. So, by strictly adhering to the strategic plan, an organization positions itself to innovate, offer products and services with distinction, achieve customer satisfaction, create value and ensure profitability and growth.

5. Strategic plan gives you the competitive advantage

A strategy plan is created with the market conditions, other market players, and your strengths and opportunities in mind. So, following the strategic plan lets an organization fulfill the objectives, seize the opportunities before the competitors and gain a competitive advantage.

6. Strategic planning makes the organization productive and efficient

Strategic planning provides the teams and individuals with common goals that they need to work towards collectively. It also provides them with a roadmap to achieve them. As a result, everyone understands what needs to be done at individual and team levels to achieve those objectives quickly and efficiently using minimal resources. This leads to greater efficiency and increased productivity at all levels.

7. Strategy planning keeps motivation levels high

When employees follow a strategic plan, they are equipped with a clear sense of direction and purpose. This drives them to meet targets faster and achieve their respective goals at individual and team levels, just like clockwork. Achievements bring appreciation and accolades; it motivates them to go farther and achieve more.

Key steps involved in the strategic planning process?

Strategic planning process involves identifying the objectives, laying out a plan of action and finding out ways to execute it. Various factors are taken into account, such as costs, financial risks, probability of success, etc. The company leadership works out a good strategic plan that is aimed at delivering the results. Following are the steps involved in this strategic planning process.

1. Analyzing the relevance of the current strategic plan

Unless your organization is a new start-up, you may already have a strategic plan in place, and it is crucial to analyze the relevance of this current strategic plan before duly revising/replacing it. For instance, the personal audio market has seen a significant shift towards wireless headphones. If you run a company that makes personal audio devices with only wired headphones, you may have to quickly analyze the relevance of your current strategy plan and allocate resources to bring out innovations that address the gaps or acquire a company that already has a product portfolio to address your shortcomings. While analyzing the current plan, the relevance of the mission statement and objectives to the current business and market conditions is analyzed, SWOT is analyzed, and implementing OKRs to manage the strategy is also analyzed.

2. Developing a new/revised strategic plan

The next step in the strategic planning process involves coming up with revised strategic objectives based on the analysis and the identified priorities. It involves brainstorming and working with different stakeholders to come up with new strategic objectives. It also involves coming up with short-term business plans in line with the overall strategy. During this phase, the stakeholders may use a strategy map to visualize the strategic plan. A strategic map is a tool that visually connects different strategic objectives and their implications. It simplifies the strategy, visualizes how it helps the organization create value, and makes it easy for employees to understand, accept and internalize the strategy.

3. Implementing the strategic plan

The strategic plan and objectives are overarching, and they require alignment, uniform understanding and widespread adoption across the organization at the team and individual levels. Adoption of strategic plans at all levels requires cascading goals from organizational objectives to the teams to individual goals. It involves allocating resources and changing policies and processes, defining the data points, metrics and key performance indicators by which successes are measured, and putting in place the reporting mechanisms to communicate the performance of the strategy to the stakeholders. This can be done by clear communication and by using frameworks that facilitate goal alignments, such as objectives and key results. By implementing the strategy plan, you can make the workforce align all their activities and efforts towards achieving the objectives.

4. Evaluating and revising the strategy

Every aspect of the organization is managed, sustained or modified only on a scientific basis – using data, measurement and evaluation; strategy is no exception. After implementing the strategy, it needs to be evaluated and adjusted if required. This is because there could be various challenges in implementing the strategy, caused by internal factors such as lack of alignment, or external factors such as the rapidly evolving market conditions that make it hard for the organization to keep up with, by means of the current strategy. The performance of the strategy is measured using the metrics and KPIs that were defined during the planning phase; if the numbers do not match the earlier projections, course corrections can be made in order to optimize the strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what makes a good strategic plan.

A good strategic plan is one that has ambitious objectives and a clear action plan to fulfill them. It has mechanisms to proactively manage risks and overcome challenges. A good strategic plan has ample room for innovation.

2. What is the main purpose of strategic planning?

The purpose of strategic planning is to come up with a vision, set priorities, formulate objectives, create an actionable plan to reach the goals, and allocate adequate resources.

3. What is a strategic planning example?

The strategic plan of a manufacturing company may include an objective to reduce production costs by 50%, for which the actionable steps may include negotiating the cost of raw materials, restructuring the workforce and adopting more cost-effective manufacturing processes.

Book a free demo with our team to learn more about how OKR software can help you from the planning process to seamless execution to optimize your organization’s performance!

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Steps for strategic planning process.

Steps involved in Strategic Planning process

Steps involved in Strategic Planning process

For a manager, strategic planning plays an important role. With strategic planning, one can easily accomplish the important goals set ahead, and can also allow the business to run with much more efficiency. Let us understand the steps involved in the strategic planning process that will yield better results. But before that, let’s first find out,

What is strategic planning?

Organizations emphasize strategic planning because it helps them to set goals and have an actionable plan to achieve those in a specific period. There may be a different plan for the organization, and with that, there are several different strategies managers implement with their teams.

Everyone employs different methods that suit them. So why do we need to understand the strategic planning process? It is because, if you use the right methods, you will be able to get better results and higher productivity, which is integral to the company’s long-term success.

Here are the 7 steps involved in strategic planning process

1. understand the need for a strategic plan:.

This is the most important step in the entire process. Before you plan out anything, you need to understand why it has to be planned, and then you can move on to other questions like how to plan and execute.

In the terms of management, it means that you have a close watch on the industry environment, how the businesses operate, and then carefully identify the opportunity for development.

And after you have identified the opportunities, you can then begin to plan out the actions that would help you take advantage of those opportunities.

2. Set Goals:

The second step in the strategic planning process is setting goals. One can set goals for both, the individual departments and also the organization as a whole.

For example, the goal for the entire organization would be to secure the bid, whereas for individual departments it would be specific performance metrics.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that, when you set goals for the organization, it can be general. But when you set goals for individual teams, they need to be specific.

Does Goal Setting Make A Difference For Success?

3. Develop Assumptions or Premises:

When you are setting goals for the organization or even the team, it has to be done with the future in mind. Of course, you cannot predict what will happen in the future, which is why you need to make plans by assuming certain things.

If your team’s goal is to increase the profits, you have to set it with a few assumptions. Because the management team cannot forecast the change in the industry scenario , and whether or not the industry will support the increase in profits.

During this process, you will have to look into both, internal and external premises.

Some of the internal premises include-

  • The expected availability of the resources.
  • The changed company policies that you will have to implement.
  • And the interaction of the levels of management with the plan.

The external premises that might affect include-

  • The social and the political environment.
  • Technological advancements.
  • The competitive environment.

4. Work on Different Ways to Achieve the Goals:

A goal can be achieved in many different ways. But you have to still research the different ways to get there. This is because we all know, one size does not fit all. You need to find the way to which your team responds the best.

Now, why is this important you might wonder? It is so that it gives the managers some flexibility to direct their team.

If one strategy does not work, it shouldn’t end there. The managers should constantly experiment with what works and what does not.

5. Choose Your Plan of Action:

Now once you have completed everything, that is set the goals, researched and evaluated different, and the best solutions to work towards it the next step is to decide the plan of action. An ideal plan of action would be the most profitable one.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that when you decide the plan of action, you have to base it on concrete evidence, like a mathematical analysis. While doing this, you can also take the elements from other plans into considerations and fit them accordingly.

6. Develop a Supporting Plan:

When you make a solid plan with all the research that is going to help you increase the profit margins, you also need to develop a secondary plan, as a support plan.

For example, if your objective is to launch a new product, the main plan may include the necessary steps like market research, product research, developing a promising marketing plan, manufacturing, etc. The secondary plan n this case would include all the necessary steps that will support the implementation of this plan.

7. Implementing the Strategic Plan:

The final step amongst the steps involved in the strategic planning process is implementing the plan that you have made. So when you are implementing the plan, you have to draw out your skills and make sure the made plan runs smoothly.

If the goals you have set are difficult, making the plan a little more complex, the managers must take their time to make sure that the team members have a better understanding of their responsibilities and align with the larger goal.

Thus, strategic planning can help the managers take out the best in their employees and team members, by promising increased productivity and efficiency. I Hope, these steps involved in Strategic Planning process will help.

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  4. 7 Steps to Strategic Planning Process

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COMMENTS

  1. What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

    During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization's mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives. The product of the planning cycle is a strategic plan, which is shared throughout the company. What is a strategic plan?

  2. Strategic Planning: A 10-Step Planning Process

    10 steps in the strategic planning process Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. - Dwight D. Eisenhower It's that time again. Every three to five years, most larger organizations periodically plan for the future. Many times strategic planning documents are shelved and forgotten until the next cycle begins.

  3. The Strategic Planning Process in 4 Steps

    Step 1: Determine Organizational Readiness Set up your plan for success - questions to ask: Are the conditions and criteria for successful planning in place at the current time? Can certain pitfalls be avoided? Is this the appropriate time for your organization to initiate a planning process? Yes or no? If no, where do you go from here?

  4. 6 Steps to Make Your Strategic Plan Really Strategic

    6 Steps to Make Your Strategic Plan Really Strategic by Graham Kenny August 07, 2018 Alicia Llop/Getty Images Summary. Many strategic plans aren't strategic, or even plans. To fix that,...

  5. The 6 steps to the strategic planning process

    1. Identify your strategic position This is where a company defines short and long-term objectives, and the steps it might take to achieve them. As an example, let's say that a soda company envisions becoming the #1 soda company in the world. One objective to achieve that might be to increase market share 10% among baby boomers.

  6. The 5 steps of the strategic planning process

    While there is no single approach to creating a strategic plan, most approaches can be boiled down to five overarching steps: Define your vision Assess where you are Determine your priorities and objectives Define responsibilities Measure and evaluate results

  7. Strategic Planning: A Guide to Develop a Strategic Plan

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  15. PDF How to write a strategic plan

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  23. Lorelei Beightol

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