The Strategic planning process is a vital aspect of strategic project management. In this article, we’ll guide you on what is the strategic planning process and 8 key steps in the strategic planning process.
Table of Contents
What Is the Strategic Planning Process?
The strategic project management process is vital for any project because these processes play a crucial role in achieving acceptable project outcomes. This process involves defining the project, creating the strategy, planning, implementing and controlling, and reviewing and learning.
Among these processes, the project planning process is an ongoing process by which a company sets its course by bringing all its project stakeholders together to inspect the current status and define its vision for the future.
Read More: Strategic Project Management – Quick overview
It inspects its strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and resources available. Furthermore, strategic planning seeks to anticipate future industry trends. During this process, the company creates a vision, mission, and values, articulates its purpose, and sets strategic goals that are long-term and short-term.
Those strategic goals help project managers inform operational goals and incremental milestones that need to be reached. The operational plan has clear objectives. Furthermore, supporting initiatives tied to which everyone is accountable. Moreover, the plan should be agile enough to allow recalibrating when necessary. Further, it allows the redistributing of resources based on internal and external forces. However, the output of the planning process is a document that is shared across the enterprise.
8 Steps in the Strategic Planning Process
As discussed earlier, strategic planning is a process in strategic project management. During this process, the following key steps you should know to ensure its success.
Gathering Information
As a manager, you should gather information from relevant sources during the strategic planning process. So, this information can be gathered from past strategic plans and environmental scan surveys. For example:
- PESTLE analysis – This analysis can be used in analyzing the external macro environment. PESTLE stands for political, economic, social and culture, technological, environmental, and legal.
- SWOT analysis – This analysis is a strategic tool that can be used in analyzing and scanning project environment. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strength and weaknesses analysis has an internal focus, while opportunities and threats analysis has an external focus.
- Industry analysis (Porter’s five forces model) – This analysis involves rivalry among existing competitors, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes, the power of suppliers, and the power of buyers. So, this analysis can be used in analyzing the external micro environment.
Read More: Strategic Project Management Frameworks
Define Vision
Vision is a future decided state. So, this is the foundation of the strategic plan. On the other hand, vision is a vital tool available to executives to inspire the people in an organization.
During the planning process, you should clearly define vision because it describes what the organization hopes to become its aspirational goal for the future and helps guide its strategies. Therefore, defining a well-structured vision clearly articulates an organization’s aspirations.
Define Mission
After defining the vision, set a clear mission accordingly. In short, a mission is an organization’s purpose and why it exists beyond making a profit. The organization’s mission is like an umbrella under which all strategic management functions occur. If strategies and goals don’t align with the organization’s mission, they should be modified, dropped, or revised.
Every project needs support from primary and secondary stakeholders, if they intend to be successful. On the other hand, a mission statement should explain to stakeholders why they should support the project by making clear what important role.
Define Values
Values create a set of behaviors that everyone in the organization can count on and expect. It is a guideline that everyone in the organization adheres. For the success of the organization, it is essential to understand and contribute to the values of stakeholders.
Identify Competition | Risk | Roadblocks
During the planning process, it is essential to discuss the impact of specific roadblocks and risks and to avoid them. So, managers can use the risk register as a framework to manage risk and uncertainties.
Define Strategic Priorities | Goals | Tactics
Strategic priorities are a handful of areas that can make the most amount of progress toward accomplishing your mission. Therefore, you should always focus on strategic priorities.
Once you have a way to measure the success of strategic priorities, you can move from the current state ‘X’ to the future state ‘Y.’ By understanding the priorities, you can make individual action plans that contribute to achieving goals.
An organization’s vision and mission give a board an overall sense of the organization’s direction. To work toward achieving these overall aspirations, you also need to define goals. Creating goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound because it will help you measure its success.
Create a Communication Plan
Make a plan to communicate your strategies and to bring people involved in your strategy. It is essential to communicate with people in the organization about where the organization is and how people can contribute to the success of it. It can include videos, audio, meetings, etc. Communication should go in both ways. It involves downward communication and upward communication.
- Downward communication is usually pushing the plan on people.
- Upward communication is usually pulling people towards the plan
Read More: Project Communication Management
Create Action Plan
During the planning process, create an action plan because it gives you a clear guide to success. With an action plan, you can prioritize goals, make better decisions, maximize resources, and enhance your organization’s efficiency and productivity as you execute your strategy.
Furthermore, an action plan will help boost your stakeholders’ morale and confidence. Internal stakeholders know what they should do to achieve the organization’s strategy, day by day and task by task. As well as external stakeholders will have confidence that efforts are coordinated and purposeful. This can build credibility and transparency. On the other hand, everyone can monitor project progress and track results toward goals.
Conclusion
Strategic planning is a process. It helps managers define their organization’s vision, mission, and values for the future and identify their organization’s goals and objectives. The strategic planning process has vital key steps. It involves gathering information, defining vision, defining mission, defining values, identifying competition, risk, and roadblocks, defining strategic priorities and goals, creating a communication plan, and creating an action plan. So, having good knowledge of these key steps, managers can make effective strategic planning.
