7 steps of strategic planning process

Strategic planning is a systematic process whereby an organisation defines its strategy and its plans to pursue this strategy.

Although many people argue that strategy and planning are two separate concepts, in practice either is useless without the other.

And so the two are often collectively described as strategic planning.

Strategic planning systems typically also encompass execution and results. This allows for the fact that few strategic plans ever unfold exactly as imagined and environmental change and internal performance factors come into play.

The four components of strategic planning

The four components of strategic planning are:

1. Strategy: Deciding what the organisation should do, where it should do it, and why it should do it.
2. Planning: Deciding who should do it, how they should do it, and when they should do it.
3. Execution: Actually doing it.
4. Results: Comparing the actual results (outcomes) to what was anticipated.

In practice, the boundaries of these activities blur as they are performed on an itera

why is strategic planning done

planning strategy