Strategic planning is the practice of looking forward, outside the immediate day-to-day running of your organisation, setting a particular set of goals and working out how to achieve them.
As far as we are concerned that also involves laying out - step-by-step - how specifically you are going to get there. Without this planning foundation in place it’s more than likely that you will get caught up in the everyday running of the business which will seem more urgent and so short term often wins over long term.
At Applied Knowledge we believe there are at least three phases you need to go through:
1. Prepare for strategic planning – getting everyone involved as you will need to get buy-in across the business and show leadership from the beginning. This will involve gathering information from inside and outside the business and possibly created a simple analysis of your environment and the pressures on it.
2. Create your strategic plan – again using as many people as possible you will need to create a simple, shareable and living plan. This means that everyone involved feels they are part of it and they can see as the plan evolves what has been achieved and what remains o be done.
3. Put your strategic plan into practice – this means ensuring that everyone involved has the time and resources to activate the plan as well as updating progress on all aspects so that the plan is kept live and relevant.
We have a range of tools that we use to enable all three of these stages so let us know if you are interested and we can show you how they work
1
Preparing for Strategic Planning
2
Creating a Strategic Plan
3
Putting the Plan into Practice