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Strategic Planning

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

- Sir Winston Churchil

What is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes/results, and assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. It is a disciplined effort that produces fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, who it serves, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future. Effective strategic planning articulates not only where an organization is going and the actions needed to make progress, but also how it will know if it is successful.

Steps to Strategic Planning

There are many different frameworks and methodologies for strategic planning. Total Operational Excellence identifies strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) through following phases: 

  • Analysis/Assessment where an understanding of the current internal and external environments is developed

  • Strategy formulation where high level strategy is developed and a basic organization level strategic plan is documented

  • Strategy execution where the high level plan is translated into more operational planning and action items

  • Evaluation where ongoing refinement and evaluation of performance, culture, communications, data reporting, and other strategic management issues occurs. 

Strategic Planning Benefits

  • Clearly define the purpose of the organization and establish realistic goals and objectives consistent with that mission in a defined time frame within the organization’s capacity for implementation.

  • Communicate goals and objectives to the organization’s constituents.

  • Ensure the most effective use is made of the organization’s resources by focusing the resources on the key priorities.

  • Provide a base from which progress can be measured and establish a mechanism for informed change when needed.

  • Bring together everyone’s best and most reasoned efforts that have important value and building a consensus about where the organization is going.

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