The power of the strategic plan

In today’s corporate world, whether you are in business, charity, ministry, sports, politics or even the academia it’s important for you to have an understanding of strategic planning. A plan is a document that should take you from where you are to where you want to be! A strategic plan looks into the future and tries to take eventualities and contingencies into consideration.

To develop a strategic plan, the organization will have to go through a number of stages which take the form of questions, as follows: 

•      Where are we now? - The analysis of the current situation.

•      Where do we want to be in the future? - Setting the objectives and the goals

•       How are we going to get there? – Creating the strategy( the details of the plan)

•      How will we know when we get there? - Monitoring and evaluation of outcomes.

Often we add a couple of other questions to the list to enable us have a more detailed picture:

            How long will it take us to get there? A time element should be involved for measurement

            What will we meet on the way? There are obstacles and hindrances that we have to overcome

             What will we need to get there? Tools comparative advantages, personnel          

Asking yourself these questions would keep you on your toes and enable a proper planning process.

Never keep the plan in your head thinking: “I have no need to write it down, because I know it back to front”. Writing it down does a lot of things for you:

1. It would enable you put the plan into a proper perspective

2. It would bring out some missing links or things you probably overlooked in the planning process

3. It would keep your plan realistic and keep your head out of the clouds so that you do not imagine too many things or take details for granted

4. It would enable you put a proper cost to the planning. You will be able to itemize the resources properly and account for what you want to spend and use.

5. A written plan would serve as guideline for you in case you end up swaying from your original intentions or you get the details mixed up.

One thing we ought to be able to do is find out if we are making progress. We should be able to ask ourselves how close we are to the goal we have set for ourselves. Mile stones in the shape of achievables or deliverables ought to be listed out to assure us how well we are doing. For instance,

if we say we want to be number one in our sector, there should be Key performance indicators that should show us how close we are to being number one.  The indicators could be numbers, market share, clientele profile or even the time of growth compared to other competitors in the sector.

Planning is invaluable, but strategic planning, anticipating most of the eventualities that could occur is the greatest form of planning that any manager should embark upon.