Strategic Planning

Developing a long term plan for organisation to attain goals.
Long term is subjective, may mean anything from three or four years to ten years depending on the industry.
Involves analysing current skills/competencies of internal resources and comparing to environment in which organisation is competing.
Strategic planning will involve analysing, deciding upon and integrating following areas:

• Internal competencies, resources, knowledge & skill sets
• Environment – competitors, economic conditions, market conditions, technology developments
• Stakeholders – all parties with an interest in organisation, e.g. shareholders, employees, banks, local communities

Number of approaches to develop strategic plan:

• Rational approach – also know as Top Down planning, three stages
  1. Strategic analysis
  2. Strategic choice
  3. Strategic implementation
• Emergent approach – strategy emerges invarirous places within organisation in response to changes in environment.
• Incremental approach – rather than rational approach, strategy is created incrementally in small parcels.