The Pitfalls in Strategic Planning - Assignment Example

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ……………………………… College …………………………… What are the pitfalls in strategic planning that management in an organization should watch out for or avoid? Identify any five pitfalls and describe them As firms are attempting to sell products or services to its potential customers, the implication of strategic planning is that it is virtually attempting to gain an advantage over other providers of similar products or services (Carpenter and Sanders, 2009, p. 10). Strategic planning and decision making thus help a firm achieve its objectives of marketing, competitive advantages, satisfactory revenues etc. However, strategic planning is not a perfect science and therefore the management in an organization has to be watchful of the major pitfalls that it has. Strategic planning requires understanding of the vision of the ideal future of the organization, but determining what can be done today in order to help the organization move to the direction of that particular vision remains to be a challenge in strategic planning (Steiner, 1997). Strategic planning is usually used to gain an overall control on business, particularly in decision-making and resources allocation processes, as they both are basic beams of the business success. It shows that strategic planning has become widely fragmented and it lacks a sound and well-defined framework (Rea and Kerzner, 1997, p. 3). Some organizations find it a way to achieve accreditation pass by or to fulfill any desired legal or regulatory requirements. Mintzberg, a famous management professor at McGill University, argued that strategic planning is a mere strategic programming, because it is simply projecting in to the future of what we already have known According to him, the formal planning is always dependable on the preservation and rearrangements of already established categories. Real strategic change necessitates inventing new ones, and not the already established ones (American Society for Training and Development, 2008, p. 129). The strategic planning will be worthless if the plans were not effectively communicated to the relevant stakeholders, especially employees. Employees keep working with a motive to achieve the pre-established set of standards and rules and they are to be updated with plans that top management take for the overall business process. Rea and Kerzner (1997) emphasized that effective strategies and planning must have combination of emergent and deliberate qualities because strategies must be able to combine some degree of flexible learning. Better communication between levels of managers and employees can enhance flexible learning environment. Most strategic planning experience breakdown due to the failure of recognizing organizational learning, because it asserts that strategic formulation and implementation can be continued to teach organizational members (p. 4). These strategic planning also can be used as tools to measure the productivity and performance of the employees, if these have been well communicated t the employees. Stevens (2006) argued that strategic planning is unrealistic because of rapid changes in today’s industries and planning always becomes an end and not a means to an end. According to him, strategic planning is not depending on completing forecasting with desired accuracy (p. 14). One of the failures of strategic planning in many organizations is that a particular level of management or specific authority assigns another group for the strategic planning ‘task’. All levels of managers are often not actively involved in the process and the outcome is that it lacks better evaluation of planning, supports from others and deep interest from all levels of managements as well. 2- Describe seven-step process of contingency planning in strategy evaluation Contingency planning is an alternative plan conducted when the strategic assumptions change quickly or when the desired organizational performance is lagging (Swayne, Duncan and Ginter, 2006, p. 437). These alternative plans or contingency plans are the results of strategic thinking that leads to take different course of actions until another strategy is undertaken. The seven-step process of contingency planning includes the following seven steps: 1) Developing a contingency planning process: In the initial phases of contingency planning, the management will identify statutory or regulatory requirements for taking contingency plans. The management then develops an IT contingency planning and obtaining approval from the relevant authorities (Vallabhaneni, 2008, p. 372). 2) Conducting Business Impact Analysis, Secondly, the management will be involved in identifying critical resources. The very basic part of this step is to identify the outage impacts and allowable outage times. As part of developing business impact analysis, the management is entrusted to develop recovery priorities as well. This helps to assess when contingency points are more likely to occur. 3) Identifying preventive controls, As an integral part of any types of planning, implementing control and maintaining standards or controls are the next step that the management is involved with. As part of this, the potential impacts, whether benefits or pitfalls, would be assessed and evaluated (Vallabhaneni, 2008, p. 372).. 4) Developing recovery strategies, The recovery strategies can be developed by identifying methods and then integrating them in to the system architecture. 5) Developing Contingency plan, the strategic management team will be developing contingency plan by document recovery strategy (Vallabhaneni, 2008, p. 372). 6) Plan testing, training and exercises, Planning the tests, exercises and training can be done through developing test objectives, developing and establishing test criteria, analyzing documents lessons being learned, incorporating them in to successful planning and providing appropriate training to the personnel (Gustin, 2010, p. 237). 7) Planning maintenance, The final step in the contingency plan is planning the maintenance which can be implemented by reviewing and updating the plans already taken, coordinating the plan with both internal and external organizations and controlling distribution as well (Swayne, Duncan and Ginter, 2006, p. 438). Strategic plans are based on the trends that an organization views to be the most likely occurrences. Even though these events may not occur, a better planning about these events and planning effective measures if these events occur helps a firm manage the contingences and avoid risks associated with it. References American Society for Training and Development, 2008, Training Programs: A Compilation of Basic Workplace Learning Programs, Astd- American Society for Training and Development Carpenter M A and Sanders W G, 2009, Strategic Management: A Dynamic Perspective Concepts and Cases, Second Edition, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education Inc Gustin J F, 2010, Disaster and Recovery Planning: A Guide for Facility Managers, Fifth edition, The Fairmont Press, Inc Rea P J and Kerzner H, 1997, Strategic Planning: A Practical Guide, Illustrated edition, John Wiley and Sons Steiner G A, 1997, Strategic planning: what every manager must know, Simon and Schuster Stevens R E, 2006, Market opportunity analysis: text and cases, Illustrated edition, Routledge Swayne L E, Duncan W J and Ginter P M, 2006, Strategic management of health care organizations, Illustrated fifth edition, Wiley-Blackwell Vallabhanen S R, 2008, Corporate Management, Governance, and Ethics Best Practices, Illustrated edition, John Wiley and Sons Read More