Strategic Business Planning
Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.
Strategic planning is an ongoing systematic structured “data based” process which assesses/ shapes an organization's potential route. Strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:
- "What do we do?"
- "For whom do we do it?"
- "How do we excel?" / ”How can we beat or avoid competition”
(Bradford and Duncan, Simplified Strategic Planning, (Chandler House, 2000)
Whether an organization is big or small the most important impact of strategic planning should be to focus attention on why the organization exists and why a number of persons are interested and committed to its purpose to such an extent that they are willing to work to make it successful.
Successful strategic planning advances the focus of an organization in that it generates:
- A clear understanding of the organization's mission, vision and values among key stakeholders (customers, suppliers, shareholders, managers, creditors, community, employees, government)
- A road map for action based on what is happening now
- Benchmarks by which we can determine achievement
- Information that can be used to market the organization
