Strategic planning - Research Paper Example

Why Do Strategic Planning? Failing to make plans means making plans for failure – as the old saying goes. Having a strategic plan means an improvement in performance in whichever undertaking a person involves himself or herself into; you cannot fail if you have a clearly defined roadmap to your desired destination. Another reason to make strategic plans is for the sake of avoiding short-term as well as inward thinking. It also enables a person, an organization or a company to be able to come up with solutions to various major issues at macro levels.

Finally, having a strategic plan means the ability to have the ability to communicate to everyone concerned about an issue, the most important or vital elements or aspects about an issue. When planning strategically, there are questions a person needs to ask himself, or herself. Some of these questions include: Where is locus at this point in time? – assessment Which point do we desire to be? This is the future state or the state we will be at the end of it all How do we hope to close the gap between our present state and our end state?

This is where the strategic plan comes into place How do we plan to monitor our progress? This involves the balanced scorecard While choosing or coming up with a strategic plan for the endeavors we engage in, it is prudent to keep in mind the fact that for a strategic plan to be considered good, it should… Be able to address issues of critical performance Be able to create the right and desired balance in between the abilities of the organization, and the desires of the organization Be able to span a considerable period in time in order to close down the performance gap Be a visionary strategic plan.

This means it should be able to convey an and state the way it is desired form the beginning Be flexible. This means that the strategic plan should accommodate and allow for change Guide the decision making in the operational, individual, and tactical lower levels of the organization or institution There are quite a number of strategic planning model. The model I choose for the purposes of this paper and assignment is the ABCDE strategic planning model. ABCDE is an acronym that stands for Assessment, baseline, Components, Down to specifics, Evaluate.

Before getting started on the strategic planning tasks and activities, there are pre-requisites to the planning steps. These include: Find out if or whether the senior leadership is committed enough to go through with the strategic process. Find out who will be tasked to do what? Find out the activities and the responsibilities each group will be tasked to do Figure out which methods will be used to handle tasks Find out the best time to do tasks Features of the ABCDE Strategic Planning Model ASSESSMENT This involves engaging in a SWOT analysis to find out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, as well as the threats to the task you would like to engage in.

The SWOT analysis best handles assessment because of the ease in understanding associated with it. Additionally, SWOT can be applied at any level of the organization in charge of the strategic planning. When saying strengths, I mean the things that you, as an organization or as an individual can be able to perform well in; points of strength. On the other hand, weaknesses are the obstacles to the path that leads to the destination. These may be such things as bad leadership or lack of it at