Strategic Planning Fundamentals

Strategic planning is vital while starting a new business or expansion of an business or planning to boost the performance of an existing business. But it requires detailed strategic planning and controlled deployment activities. Strategic planning is used to delivers its value proposition and achieve its mission.

The main difference between Strategic planning and long term planning is long term planning is developed based on the current scenario but in strategic planning we anticipate future changes. These are the fundamentals of strategic planning.

Business Mission

The mission statement identifies purpose of the business and the reason for its existence. The mission statement - the organization future - ensures consistency and clarity of purpose throughout the organization. The business mission definitions are either misleading or missing, if the perspectives are inaccurate and misleading — so wrong decisions continue to be made for the wrong reasons.

Strategic Analysis

A Strategic analysis and understanding of your marketplace, your financial perspective and capabilities forms the foundation for the strategy development process. From the analysis, applying creativity, developing a strategy map will produce a number of options and opportunities that can be used to build and implement a solid strategic plan for new or existing markets.

Strategic Procedure

In this segment we should concentrate on where the organization should be going rather than how it should get there. The vital issues facing the organization are, to achieve its mission should be basis for this segment. There are three steps in this segment

Identifying the key strategic thrusts

This step produces the inventory of key strategic thrusts that are emphasized to address the vital issues.

Prioritizing the key strategic thrusts

The next step is to prioritize the strategic thrusts. Criteria for ranking should be based on which area has more impact on the organization's capability to fulfill its mission. It is a good practice, prior to ranking, to state clearly and agree on what each strategic area encompasses. The highest ranking key strategic area will be the "driving force" of the strategy and the one requiring the most time and resources allocated to it.

Implementation

A evaluation with the current strategy should be carryout at this segment. An assessment of the structure and operations of the business must be carried out to ensure whether it is jelling with the new business objectives. These are the list of department has to be examined

1. Resource distribution: Whether enough resources are available for next financial year

2. Organization formation: Whether the jobs are defined propely. There are proper committee are there to deal with the stage

3. Communication systems: Whether the organization communication management is effective?

4. People accountable: are there people identified as "in charge" of each objective?

5. Incentive systems: how will people be recognized or receive incentive for achieving results?

Ramki is with Axsellit Technologies Business Software. Axsellit Software delivers professional, benefit-enriched business solutions with an unbeatable performance-to-price ratio. Axsellit Technologies provides Strategic Planning and Balanced Scorecard Software.

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