The Executive Suite: How to Develop a Strategic Plan

Saturday, October 12, 2013

How to Develop a Strategic Plan

A strategic business plan serves as a guide. It helps leaders of organizations identify their objectives and formulate detailed plans on how to achieve them. It also serves as a source of motivation for employees who will use it to understand what they are working towards and what is expected of them. The strategic business plan is a necessary tool for the success of any company.

Suggestions

Begin by stating the company's objective. This will help guide you through the SWOT analysis process. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Discover your company's strengths. Write down all the attributes of the company that will help it achieve the objective in Step 1. Find out how your company may capitalize on these strengths.
Assess the company's weaknesses. Make a list of all the things that might harm the organization's ability to achieve its objective. Consider how your organization may improve on these weaknesses.

Identify the company's opportunities. Recognize external situations that may prove helpful towards achieving the company's objective. Discuss how your organization may benefit from these opportunities.
Recognize threats. Identify external situations that may damage the company's success. Find out what steps your organization can take to protect itself from these threats.
Examine the results of the analysis to determine whether the stated objective is attainable. If the objective is not possible based on the internal state of the company and it's external environment, then you will need to identify another objective and repeat the analysis.
Write a strategic business plan. When you have discovered an objective that is attainable, use the information gathered from the SWOT analysis to develop the elements of your strategic business plan.

Create a vision statement. A vision statement tells the readers of the strategic plan where the organization intends to be in the future. Your vision should inspire your employees as well as your shareholders. It should be concise.
Develop a mission statement. Unlike the vision statement, the mission statement focuses on the present. Your mission statement should define your customers, your desired level or performance and your critical processes.
Identify critical factors. Critical factors are those are necessary for the business to achieve its vision and mission statements. Examples of critical factors include obtaining resources necessary for operations, profitability, achieving credibility and employing cost-effective manufacturing processes.
Create strategies and actions. Take each critical factor and break it down into the strategies and actions necessary for implementation. Arrange these by order of priority.
Draw up an implementation schedule for your strategies. Your prioritized implementation schedule should include the start date, milestone date and completion date for each strategy.
Simplify the process. Software, such as "Automate Your Business Plan 2008" by Linda Pinson, and workbooks, such as "The Strategic Planning Workbook" by Neville Lake, make the process of developing a strategic business plan less complex. See the Resources section below for a link.