Strategic Planning
There are many approaches to strategic planning, including SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, PEST (political, economic, social, technology) analysis, and scenario planning. Each will be described briefly, recognizing that strategic planning is a huge topic around which many books have been written.
Most, but not all approaches to strategic planning include the following steps:
1. Create a mission statement to last about 10 years
2. Create a vision statement to last 15 to 20 years.
3. Create a philosophy/values statement or incorporate it into the vision statement.
4. Conduct a scan (discussed in the next section) to analyze the environment and competitors.
5. Create strategies/goal categories to be implemented in 3 years and 5 years.
6. Within each strategy category, create tactics to move the organization for the next year toward accomplishing that strategy/goal.
7.for 3 and 5 years strategies, do decision trees (described later in this chapter)to determine what needs to be done each year to insure that steps are taken in the appropriate year to have the goal accomplished on time.
All approaches to strategic planning require that the organization be skillful in doing scans (step 4), both externally and internally. This concept will be discussed before each approach is described.