• Provide a focus for your efforts and limited investments.
• It gives something to your team something to rally around and be excited about: Enthusiasm.
• Helps you and your organization to identify the risk and opportunities in the market.

Principals of strategic planning

• Set a clear direction and stay in your lane.
• Say no to distractions.
• Diversify your bets, you have limited pools of people, money and time so make sure don’t put your all the eggs into one basket.

Avoiding Major strategic planning risks

This strategic planning gets a lot of time and a lot of energy it is a kind of high resource type exercise.

It can be a pain to top-level managers who work on it, the worst thing that can happen is everybody puts in effort and times to this strategic planning and then it gets archived, put on a shelf.

How to determine flawed strategic planning.

• Initiative proliferation:

Do you have to use multiple pages just to add up all the different initiatives you are thinking about pursuing?

• Thinking too small:

All the initiatives are small in the list and they will grow up the business by the incremental way so, don’t think it as too small to make this as the strategic plan.

• Thinking too big:

Most of the initiatives are big, it will be taking really huge bet with your organization. Always you have to think about the future of the organization and make it sustainable. always invest in a business that has a clear future. The current business won’t be in the future so invest an amount of money on small businesses also.

• Random Initiative generator:

Always there must be a clear focused plan about the future of the company. It must be directional one so there are no multidirectional points in strategic planning there is only focused planning with the sustainable proper actions.

Strategic Planning Process:

This planning is about mostly set up directions and stay in the lane. At this point we have to think about three main aspects of the planning as well as project planning in PMP.

It is,

• Visions
• Missions
• Goals

after setting up the destination it is important to define the organization’s core competencies.

What are we great at, how you are going to compete in the market?

Then the next process is defining strategic filters, actually, this is the main part of the method. These filters are going to be objective functions that you are going to achieve. There will be an evaluation criterion you will use for pursuing initiatives.

Next, prohibit the distractions and stay focused, then at this point you have to use two by two matrix (2x2 Matrix) to evaluate which opportunities should pursue or not.

Get all the initiatives and run through the strategic filters to identify the ones that are high value and high potential and one that should be avoided.

Draw the line: Strategic planning is about focus, you will have your list of initiatives and you can identify the top ones and bottom ones and resource them appropriately, then work on the things above the line for which you have resources.

Then you are set up and,

•  check to diversify portfolio 
• execute the plan

you look for your initiatives according to they are long term, short term, do they balance the core competencies, or they balanced across products or markets or services. You will look at your portfolio and how it evolves over time. You have to use tools for each and every step to make prioritize a set of initiatives.

Tactical Needs in strategic planning

It is important to aware that there will be times you are working together as a team and people are off on their own doing individual works. In a good strategic planning process, individual workers doing some per-works then come together as a team and work on things like visions and missions after that team can go away. Then individually team members evaluating the initiatives, after that, the team comes together and prioritize the initiatives by prioritization meeting. After that phrase, the team members do an individual deep analysis of their certain initiative on their own. Finally, the team come back together and make the meeting about final planning about resource allocations.

After the above process, you will get a strategic plan with documentation. The documentation must contain,

•  Core Competencies: about what your organization great at.
•  Prioritize initiative list: the initiatives that your organization is going to pursuing according to hierarchy.
• Implementation & sequence planning: Where you have identified which initiatives when and what resources are, we going to allocate.