Effective strategic planning requires only a handful of procedures.
Start by engaging commitment
Purpose guides everything
Analyze the organization in its context
Decide strategies
Evaluate plan execution.
Improve long-term performance of your organization, at dramatically reduced risk, with these five simple strategic planning process elements or procedures.
This is how you Start and ensure Support for planning, and the implementation of the plan. The people you need to include are primarily the Chief Executive Officer and their immediate reporting managers, and the layer of staff or management at one remove from the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
In turn the CEO must engage with the governing body, who in turn engage the beneficiary groups they are there to represent. Other stakeholder groups may possibly be affected by the implementation of the strategic corporate plan in the operation of the enterprise. Their interests must be respected. It must be remembered that the processes for engaging people operate in various ways in all the other stages of the planning process.
These objectives should clearly further the enduring Purpose of the organization. This means knowing and spelling out for whom the organization exists, and what benefit the organization seeks to provide this group. Every organization, whether private company or nonprofit organization (NPO), should set out to benefit one clearly defined group of beneficiaries, and a single, long term, verifiable, target figure should be set to reflect what it is trying to do for them. If it cannot set such a target, the organization should be reformed until this becomes possible.
The intended beneficiaries must be defined as one homogeneous group; in the case of the business enterprise it is the owners or shareholders.
The benefit offered must also be homogeneous and capable of definition in just a few words. In the business context, the proposed benefit is something like ‘increased wealth’. The benefit must be capable of being targeted and of empirical verification- essentially then, it must be quantifiable.
It must be of perceived significance to the beneficiaries, e.g. the benefit resulting from the point of view of the shareholders is ‘improved prospects for an acceptable mix of capital gains and dividends within a risk profile that is tolerable’.