Strategic Planning Process

 Strategic Planning Process

According to Merkus et al. (2019), a strategy is a plan used by every management level within an organization to achieve the organization’s objectives and realize its long-term goals. The main types of organizational strategies are corporate, business, and functional. Corporate strategy focuses on all functions within the organization. The business strategy focuses on success in specific markets and attaining a competitive advantage. The functional strategy focuses on improving the functions within an organization and supporting the corporate strategy. Organizations rely on a strategic plan to improve performance and achieve long-term and short-term goals. The main components of a strategic plan include the organization’s mission, strategy, goals, and policy (Grant, 2019). Therefore, effective strategic planning requires understanding the organization’s objectives and goals.

Basic Strategic Planning Process

A basic strategic planning process includes determining the organization’s position, developing a strategy, building the strategic plan, and managing the plan’s performance. Determining the organization’s position includes identifying strategic issues, collecting and analyzing industry and market data, collecting customer insights, collecting employee input, and conducting a SWOT analysis. Industry and market data are essential in identifying market opportunities that can be leveraged to increase organizational growth and performance. Developing the strategy includes creating the organization’s values, mission, vision, competitive advantage, and long-term objectives. The competitive advantage can be determined by conducting a PESTEL analysis or reviewing Porter’s five forces. According to Arshed & Pancholi (2016), Porter’s five forces can help an organization determine the factors impacting competition within a specific industry. Therefore, organizations can create a strategy to deal with the forces and leverage the opportunities they create to increase their competitive advantage.

Building a strategic plan requires the collaboration of everyone in the organization. This process includes using the SWOT analysis results to set the organization’s priorities, setting mid to short-term goals, creating a budget, and setting key performance indicators. The key performance indicators are vital in tracking the organization’s progress toward accomplishing its goals. The goals should also be SMART, and the organization’s mission and vision should be considered. After the organization achieves the strategic plan’s objectives, it is important to manage performance and focus on identifying and making the improvements that may be needed to align the plan with the organization’s goals. Managing performance may include communicating the strategy to everyone in the organization, creating a schedule for reviewing the progress of the strategy implementation process, and holding progress reviews. The reviews may include considering the key performance indicators and conducting surveys within the organization. Managing performance also includes regularly updating the strategy. The updates may be conducted annually to create enough time for the organizations to identify areas for improvement and plan how to improve.

Conclusion

Strategic planning is important in enhancing organizational performance. Organizations may focus on developing a corporate, functional, and business strategy based on their vision, goals, and objectives. A basic strategic planning process includes identifying strategic issues, analyzing the business environment based on customer insights and market and industry data, analyzing the organization’s internal environment based on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, setting a mission, vision, and goals, creating a competitive advantage and creating key performance indicators. Organizations should regularly monitor the progress of the implementation of the strategic plan to ensure that it helps in achieving long-term and short-term goals. It is also important to manage the performance of the strategic plan by communicating it to everyone in the organization and updating it regularly.

References

Arshed, N., & Pancholi, J. (2016). Porter’s five forces and generic strategies. Enterprise and Its Business Environment. https://doi.org/10.23912/978-1-910158-78-4-2922

Grant, R. M. (2019). Contemporary strategy analysis. Wiley & Sons.

Merkus, S., Willems, T., & Veenswijk, M. (2019). Strategy implementation as performative practice: reshaping organization into alignment with strategy. Organization Management Journal, 16(3), 140–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/15416518.2019.1611403

ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

We’ll write everything from scratch

---

Unit 3 Pre-Assessment: Strategic Planning Process
Attached Files:
File Unit 3 Pre-Assessment.pdf Unit 3 Pre-Assessment.pdf – Alternative Formats (131.105 KB)
Due: Sunday by 11:59 pm
The most successful companies develop and implement an effective strategic plan to help them pursue their organizational goals. However, even the best strategic plan won’t be very effective if the human resources function isn’t in alignment with it. Through this assignment, explore the strategic planning process.

Refer to the attached document for assignment details and grading rubric.
Note: You must complete the pre-assessment first. Any journals posted before a pre-assessment is completed will not be graded until the pre-assessment is posted.