What Are The 5 Steps in Strategic Planning Process?

1. What is Strategic Planning Process

The five steps in the strategic planning process are, in the simplest terms, the method used by organizations to develop plans to achieve overall, long-term goals.This method varies from the project planning approach used to organize and delegate assignments for specific projects, or strategy mapping, which allows you to define your purpose, vision, and objectives.

The five steps in the strategic planning process are more comprehensive — it helps you create a roadmap for which strategic goals you should make an effort to achieve, and which initiatives are less useful to the business. Helping you understand your internal and external strategy.

The process of strategic planning is the steps you take as an organization to determine:

• Your organization's management (Vision)
• What and for whom are you going to do (Mission)
• How to measure and guide your strategy towards where you want to be (Objectives)

It's important to consider why we primarily do strategic planning:

• To get your team on the same page and align with the vision, mission, and goals of your organization;
• It is maximizing your organization's resources to avoid wasting time and money on unimportant projects or activities;
• To understand the trends and scenarios in the industry that might affect your organization in the coming years;
• To Develop an action schedule for keeping you and your staff on track and to be responsible for the outcomes.

2. The 5 Steps of Strategic Planning Process

There are mainly 5 steps during the strategic planning in general:

Step 1: Clarify Your Strategic Position

This phase of preparation sets the stage for all the work to progress. It would help if you decided where to go, and how to get there.

Considering both internal and external sources, get the right stakeholders involved right from the start. Identify main competitive issues by talking to the company's managers, collecting input from clients, and gathering business and consumer data to get a better view of the market and customer role.

Use a SWOT-diagram as a framework for your initial assessment. The diagram below is built in EdrawMax, illustrates the SWOT analysis of Apple Inc.

Source:EdrawMax

Step 2: Prioritize Your Objectives

After the current market position has been established, objectives that will help meet expectations. Specific objectives will be in accordance with the mission and direction of the organization.

Objectives ought to be distinguishable and quantifiable to help achieve the strategic long-term goals and initiatives identified in step one.

SMART - Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timeliness. SMART goals are useful in setting a timeline and identifying the capital and resources should be achieved, and also key performance indicators ( KPIs) for measuring the success. So that everyone in the organization could incline to work harder for making goals true.

Step 3: Formulate A Strategy

This phase involves identifying the strategies required to accomplish the goals and mapping out a schedule and effective communication of responsibilities.

Strategy mapping is an excellent tool for making to visualize the entire plan. Furthermore, operating from the top-down structural maps makes it possible to see market operations and to find progress opportunities. Since the market and economic conditions are dynamic, the creation of alternative solutions to address each phase of the strategy is crucial at this point.

Step 4: Implement and Manage The Strategy

Effective implementation of the strategy is key to the growth of the business enterprise. This phase is the action stage for the strategic management process. In case the cumulative strategy does not work with the existing operations of the business, a new structure and strategy should be installed at the beginning of this phase.

By mapping the processes, the broader strategy can be transformed into a concrete plan. Use the KPI dashboards to communicate the team responsibilities effectively.

Step 5: Monitor and Evaluate Strategy

The strategic plans and priorities will be checked and revised once a year to incorporate with new business adjustments, and ensure targets are based on the organization's constantly-changing environment.

Strategy assessment and control actions include performance measurements, consistent review of internal and external issues and, where necessary, corrective actions. Any successful strategic evaluation starts with the definition of the parameters to be measured.

3. Examples of Strategic Planning Process

This strategic planning diagram drew in EdrawMax illustrates the cooperation and communication increase in the business. It shows the procedure from understanding the goals and missions to analyse the strategic plan.

This diagram illustrates the process of creating and planning goals, which explicitly depicts the five steps in the strategic planning process. Through this diagram, the each step is listed so as to better implement the strategy.

4. Summary

Effective strategic planning requires a collective effort between you and your team. Besides, the external factors is also crucial to decide the quality of strategy. Plus, Strategic planning must be flexible as well, so that with the time goes on, the strategy should change accordingly. While your business needs to have goals and objectives, you also need to be able to respond to changes.

EdrawMax can be used to create your plan, as it is user-friendly and has multiple templates available. Just try to create your strategic planning in 5 steps - clarifying the strategic position, defining objectives, developing a plan, implementing the plan, and evaluating and measuring the plan.