Strategic Planning & Management-An Introduction and Importance

Strategic Planning & Management-An Introduction and Importance:


Suppose you decide to go somewhere but you don,t know about the destination, necessary bag and baggage, route and companions, then what would be done. Definitely it will be a big disaster. You would never reach your destination. Like this, if you are running your business, company or any type of organization and you don,t have the Strategic Plan then it means that you are aiming your target in the dark black night.

Strategic Plan is just like a map which directs and controls your journey. In other words, it is a lighthouse which navigates the right direction of your business ship. You cannot achieve your goals and objectives without Strategic Planning and Management. It tells you about your current situation that where do you stand at the moment, where you have to go and how to get there. Beside this, it also tells you what are the tools and strategies you needed to reach your destination. It helps you to select a right person for right job, ultimately you make a perfect team for your organization. And the most important thing is that it keeps you inform about the competency of your competitors in the market and suggests to develop strategies to compete in the market..

If you have a proper planning for your task, it means you have won fifty percent war before getting on the war field. If you don't have a plan for your business it means you are planning to fail. The sum and substances is that Strategic Plan is just like a  dashboard which shows your speed, direction, current position, fuel quantity, total distance to reach you destination, your competitors' competency, environment, culture etc.

Strategic Planning & Management: Definition

Technically, the term "Strategic Planning and Management" is comprised of three words: strategy, planning and management. "Strategy or Strategies" means your methods or techniques you opt to achieve your already set objectives of your company or organization. "Planning" means you prepare or equip yourself for your journey keeping in mind all the prerequisites of this journey: a right team, strategies, resources, right tools, objectives, vision, mission, time slate, action plan etc.
"Management" means the proper implementation, tracking and assessment of your Strategic Plan. Definitely, we use different tools and frameworks for tracking and assessing our progress and achievement.

Preliminary of Strategic Planning and Management:

Before making Strategic Plan for your organization, these questions must be kept in mind.
Who are we?
Where are we?
Where do we want to go (or not go) and why?
How do we get there?
How do we know when we get there?
What resources we need to get there?

In simple words we must know about our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threads. To assess our current situation we use a well-known framework called SWOT analysis. SWOT is acronym of strengths, weaknesses, threads and opportunities. This is important to know about your strengths which make you unique as compare to you competitors. You also should be aware about weaknesses in order to overcome in future. This is also very important to know about external threads for your business. Lastly, opportunities you may avail in order to expand your business. The crux of the discussion is that before making strategic plan we must analyse our current situation of the organization through SWOT analysis. We can also use PETS analysis for environmental scanning. PETS is the acronym of political factors, economic factors, socio-cultural factors, technological factors. We will discuss SWOT and PEST analysis ahead in detail.

We can understand situation analysis or organizational scanning by the given figure easily.

Note: It should be very much clear that situation analysis or organizational scanning is the preliminary step or prerequisite for Strategic Planning and Management. We analyse or scan organizations through SWOT or PEST analysis. We can use some more tools and frameworks for this purpose as well.


Steps or Functions of Strategic Planning and Management.

This is very important to know and understand the steps of Strategic Planning & Management.
Important steps or functions of Strategic Planning & Management are as under.

1. Vision
2. Values
3. Mission
4. Objectives
5. Assessment

For the sake of ease, we can make an acronym VMOSA for these steps.
In next consecutive posts, we will discuss in detail that what is vision and mission, what is SMART vision and mission, how to develop vision mission, objectives, strategies and assessment. We will also discuss tools and frameworks which are supportive for Strategic Planning and Management.