Reflection of Strategic Planning

Reflection of Strategic planning

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal most often "winning". A strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.

A strategic planning is a problem-solving solution and a guiding principle of action. We have target-setting first and then we can establish the strategic planning. Strategic planning is to achieve organization’s specific target. Generally speaking, target-setting, strategic planning and implementation can be the 3 basic steps to solve the problem. An organization simply cannot know what it is doing and what it intends to do unless it periodically establishes and monitors its goals.

A strategic planning itself is a planning. Why is the planning strategic? It is because the planning has a particular objective. For example, we may want to promote the students’ learning effect in a short time or we plan to increase a new department in the college after one year.

When we set a target, we need simultaneously to set quantitative indicators which we want to achieve and can be used to examine the effect of implementation. However, we have to know that all indicators should have their own strategic intent. Then, we can plan how to reach the target and when to start.

Furthermore, no matter how perfect a strategic planning is, organizations need persons to execute the strategic plan. Owing good leaders in each functional department is not only a competitive advantage but also ensure the effect of implementation. Therefore, training in the work is necessary and must be included in strategic planning. Every member in the organization should recognize his/her role in the strategic plan and enhance his/her management ability to develop his/her own career path in the organization. Strategic planning enables members in the organization to influence the organization’s future.

It is also important for organization to build its SOP (standard operation procedure) in the strategic plan. Because there are many uncertainty in the implementation stage, SOP can help everyone in the organization to handle unexpected emergency.

Now, let’s come back to discuss strategic planning. From the articles we read, we already learn some models of strategic planning process. What are the differences between them? Are they proper to achieve the objective? There is no one perfect strategic planning model for each organization. Every organization ends up developing its own nature and model of strategic planning, often by selecting a model and modifying it as they go along in developing its own planning process. Is the size an important factor for selecting the model? Which model is suitable for for-profit or nonprofit organization? I found more questions than answers after I read the articles for this week.