The components of strategic planning

What is the current level of strategic planning in the United States? What objectives are quantified in the strategic plans? What kinds of environmental factors are identified in the planning process? What areas are planned for? How often are the strategic plans reviewed? These are among the questions which were raised in a recent survey of 323 companies whose results are summarized in this paper. It is hoped that this study will permit practitioners to compare their planning with planning being performed in their industry.Suggested improvements in the stategic planning process include more frequent monitoring of performance against the plans, more comprehensive environmental surveillance, and greater emphasis on organizational structure plans. The strategic planning process was found to be constantly evolving and cyclical. The strategic planning activity expanded during adversity and contracted when business prospects were good.     

Business planning in successful small firms

Strategic planning has been widely publicized during the last decade, but what has been accomplished by this management activity in smaller, high-growth firms? Business plans have been widely recommended for start-up funding, but we have noted additional uses for business plans in pratice. This article reports methods and results of strategic planning and written business plans in high-growth ‘INC. 500’ firms. In spite of a variety of obstacles, over half of the firms conduct strategic planning on a regular basis. Results of this study show that fast-growth firms develop written business plans as a product of strategic planning, mainly by five key management personnel. Written business plans are used more for internal management purposes than for start-up funding. Finally, the completion of strategic planning is positively associated with a firm's profitability. Based on survey and interview data, this article describes a four-phase model to help ensure effective integration of strategic planning processes and the resulting written business plans.     

Planning for strategic decision support systems

The emergence of Strategic Decision Support Systems has opened up new vistas for the true integration of formal models into the strategic planning process. However, with these new opportunities also come the need to develop planning mechanisms that will permit these sophisticated systems to achieve their potential. The process of strategic planning for Strategic Decision Support Systems that is described in this article serves to cast the organization's overall plans, strategies and strategic attributes into a framework that can be used to develop formal SDSS plans.     

Public Knowledge of and Involvement with Metropolitan and Local Strategic Planning in Australia

Despite academic and practitioner debate surrounding public involvement in planning, little is actually known about the extent to which the public is aware of the planning process. The focus of this paper is the examination of the underlying, latent public knowledge of the planning system in Australia. This latent knowledge (or more accurately, the absence of this knowledge) emerges as a barrier to public involvement. This paper examines public perceptions of the importance of metropolitan and local strategic plans, knowledge of these plans, the main sources of this knowledge, and the extent to which the public is likely to become involved with strategic planning process. The paper concludes that despite large segments of the population viewing strategic planning as important, only a small proportion is actually aware of the plans themselves, while an even smaller proportion is likely to become involved in the planning process.     

Strategic planning in large firms—some guidelines

Some argue that a foundation for planning has been achieved when a firm can state its strategic plan in terms of products and markets. (This is referred to as the ‘business form’ in this article). If this statement is true, what factors will aid a firm in achieving the business form in its strategic plans? In this article, details of strategic planning in over 50 large firms taken from an empirical research sample are examined to illustrate which factors seem to lead to the business form of strategic plan in these firms.     

Strategic Planning in the Malawi Public Sector: Potential Tool for Progress or Regression?

The process of developing strategic plans in the public sector is regarded as one indicator of positive reform in the system. The assumption is that strategic planning ensures that (just like in the private sector) public sector organizations’ operations should cost less but deliver better service. Ultimately the argument is that public sector institutional governance and responsiveness to the citizenry is not only seen but felt. However, strategic planning has to be done in an appropriate manner for it to deliver. For instance an analysis of the underlying motives, the role of leadership in the process as well as the relevance or viability of the guiding strategic planning model significantly affect the nature of expected results. In the early 2000s, the Malawi public sector embarked on a serious drive towards strategic planning process as part of its reform package. In order to ascertain it’s potential to transform the Malawi public service, this paper focuses at critically analyzing the strategic planning process in the Malawi public sector by among other things asking: who initiated and led the process? What approach determined the process? What is the possible potentiality of the adopted strategic planning approach in enhancing the reform agenda in Malawi? Based on interviews with senior officers in key Malawi public sector institutions, the paper concludes that the strategic planning process is ‘transitional and fluid’ hence lacks the clout to effectively enhance reforms in this sector. Another finding is that lack of effective leadership has largely contributed to the status quo.     

Formal strategy in public hospitals

This paper suggests that the difficulties associated with the application of formal strategic planning in public professional service organizations may have been underestimated in much of the literature. A survey of written strategic plans produced by Canadian hospitals showed that these plans were often heavily oriented towards expansion, ambiguous and rather loosely integrated, leading to questions concerning their realism and utility as a basis for strategic decisions. This phenomenon seems symptomatic of the complex (and often highly political) decision making environment faced by hospital administrators (and by managers of other professional service organizations such as universities and social service agencies). It is concluded that the benefits of formal planning may be different and less tangible for these organizations than for private business.     

Hospital and medical staff strategic planning: developing an integrated approach

The physician as the principal customer of the hospital is a relatively new concept, indicative of the shift to a more complete market orientation in strategic planning. Although medical staff and medical community dynamics receive increasing attention in strategic planning, much more sophistication is now needed to involve physicians constructively in strategic planning for the hospital and medical staff. While full consonance of physician and hospital plans may be achievable only in a completely integrated delivery system, there is considerable room for improvement in current organizational models.     

Strategic planning—A new arrival in Hungarian industry

This paper outlines the fairly recent history of strategic planning in Hungary, which is still by no means widespread. Strategic planning in business has to co-exist with the official national 1 and 5 year plans. At the present time some 30 percent of Hungarian industrial companies have some type of strategic planning practice, and the rest have some version of official planning. Those with good independent planning practices have proved more able to survive in a changing environment.     

Long range planning— Japan-USA— A comparative study

This article reports on a comparative study carried out in the U.S.A. and Japan. He concludes that in the U.S.A. long range planning is used to integrate the strategies of divisions and to control the divisions. The planning process is usually bottom-up rather than top-down.In Japan, long range planning is used for improving strategic decisions of top management, so the planning process is a centralized interactive process.Project emphasis rather than quantitative planning is a common characteristic in both the U.S.A. and Japan. However American corporations are more advanced in this respect. Many Japanese corporations suggest that project emphasis is the key success factor for planning.To cope with uncertainty, American corporations tend to update their plans every year or even at shorter intervals, while adopting contingency plans.To the same end, Japanese corporations are using two time horizon plans which are composed of a long range strategy and a medium range plan.With respect to follow-up and implementation, American corporations follow-up more closely and long range planning is used for the evaluation of managers of divisions. The quality of plan and accomplishment are reflected to the economic rewards.Japanese corporations are less inclined to follow up the long range plan itself, but it is considered as important to implement it through the budget and also through the project plan. Project teams are quite frequently used.     

Comprehensive planning for libraries

In the area of planning, the literature has been almost entirely concerned with planning in the business (i.e. profit) setting. Some literature does exist on planning in the nonprofit sector, but it usually deals with tactical planning of the short-term character. This is specially true in the area of libraries and many librarians have developed and do administer large, complex organization— where conprehensive, long range planning is almost completely untreated in the literature.The current paper discusses the various steps in the strategic planning process, and relates them to a situation in which comprehensive long range plans for a new health sciences library have been developed, and to a considerable degree, implemented. In this framework, the steps of developing purpose and objecives, forecasting and policy formulation, developing and choosing growth strategy, determining resource requirements and provions, developing an organizational structure, and control system utilization are discussed both in the general framework of comprehensive planning, and with respect to actual experience in the development of a health sciences library. The roles of tactical planning and the implementation of plans are also treated.     

Can technology be managed strategically?

The purpose of this article is to investigate techniques for inserting strategic management of technology into the overall business planning process. The method developed here begins with defining the technological profile of a company and then proceeds to expand the method to incorporate analytical procedure for technology futuring, and finally combining these long-range forecasts with the company's policies and plans into an integrated planning model. An illustrative case study of the NCR Corporation is appended to demonstrate the application.     

Strategic management in a firm of consulting engineers

This article describes the introduction of strategic management in a large and diversified company of consulting engineers in Brazil. This was done by a massive strategic planning effort in which the 60 top people of the company actively participated. This approach was chosen to produce both a comprehensive corporate strategy and strategic management capability throughout the company. The project therefore gave as much attention to training and guidance as to planning itself. Psychological, organizational and ‘political’ factors were taken seriously into account. Project management was a good joint-venture between some top people inside and some external consultants, strongly interacting with each other. The project resulted not only in plans, but also in decisions, including tidying-up the divisional structure of the firm. The article evaluates the project to determine success factors in such undertakings. It is interesting for managers to appreciate the factors involved in efforts to produce plans, develop managers and reorient a company at the same time. It is also interesting because it shows a fruitful, although demanding role for management consultants in strategic reorientations: more committed, more ‘on-line’ than experts submitting recommendations; less amorphous and more performance-oriented than organizational development gurus.     

Strategic Information Systems Planning: Planning System Dimensions,Internal Coalignment,and Implications for Planning Effectiveness

Improving strategic information systems planning (SISP) remains a critical concern of both practitioners and academics. To date, a rather large number of studies have examined or proposed analytical techniques, frameworks, and tools for developing strategic plans. As a direct consequence of this emphasis, methodologies have often become the basis for characterizing the entire process of SISP within the information systems literature. Recent theoretical work suggests that such characterizations are unnecessarily narrow and that planning activities within organizations can be more accurately conceptualized as systems of behaviors, agendas, or process dimensions. Working within this contemporary theoretical perspective, the findings of this study suggest that SISP can be operationalized along distinct dimensions of comprehensiveness (extent of solution search), formalization (rules and procedures to guide activities), focus (creativity or control), flow (top down, bottom up), participation (number and variety of planners), and consistency (frequency of planning cycles). Similar to previous theoretical work and case studies, higher order factor modeling of these dimensions suggests that planning systems that exhibit aspects of rationality (high comprehensiveness, high formalization, control focus, top-down flow), and adaptation (high participation, high consistency) are positively associated with planning effectiveness.     

How corporate planning responds to uncertainty

This article is based upon an SSRC research project into the influence of computer methods on decision making. During this research, information on the planning systems of a cross-section of British industry was obtained.The paper illustrates how managers in these firms were coping with planning in the present conditions of extreme uncertainty about the future, combined with adverse economic and business conditions. Conventional planning theory, together with some modern observations on it, are briefly described and then the paper shows how, in the firms visited, the structure of planning was more complex than this theory.It goes on to show that today's critical conditions were not leading to management putting aside their plans and computer models and “muddling through’. They were actually leading to an acceleration in the adoption of formal planning and decision making methods but in a somewhat different manner to conventional planning theory.Seven different modes of planning were identified with integrated operational planning being the most common, possibly the most essential to survival and sometimes the only planning possible into today's conditions. A trend to extend the operational plan to 2 to 3 years and to reduce the firm's long range plan from 5 to 3 years was also observed.Long range plans were being considered as planning and decision making tools and not as blue-prints of the firm's future, as accurate long range forecasting was impossible. Three types of strategic planning were identified with that carried out at intervals probably being the most appropriate for medium sized firms in today's conditions.     

Integrating strategic issues into strategic management

The notion of a ‘strategic issues’ is rather pervasive in the field of planning in both conceptual [5, 19] and practical contexts. For instance, sometime ago the Wall Street Journal [41] reported that at least 50 large firms have created positions of ‘issues management director’; a dramatic increase in the number of such positions. ‘True’ strategic issues have a readily apparent importance to any organization; yet the process of identifying such issues and of integrating them into strategic planning and management is not well developed. Most treatments of strategic issues deal only with specific segments of the overall process through which relevant issues may be initially identified and finally translated into appropriate strategy [e.g. 5, 17]. This paper demonstrates that it is practical to develop a comprehensive process of ‘strategic issue management’ (SIM) that will facilitate the systematic identification, assessment and analysis of such issues. Such a process can ensure that issue-related factors are fully integrated into the formulation and implementation of strategy and plans. As such, SIM is a process whereby strategic issues may become an integral element of strategic management.     

An Examination of IT Planning in a Large,Diversified Public Organization*

The conduct of information technology (IT) planning processes has been of dominant managerial concern in public and private organizations. Yet, current IT planning research offers little guidance on the types of planning actions and behaviors that are appropriate to organizational contexts. We focus on the conduct of the IT planning process by describing an exploratory research project. The project empirically examined a number of issues associated with managing IT planning within a single large public enterprise, particularly identifying actions and behaviors related to producing quality IT plans. The results of the study yield some useful set of guidelines; most interesting is the importance of building IT infrastructure based on IT sophistication and innovativeness for large agencies to improve plan quality. Other recommendations include having a focused, balanced technology and business planning orientation that incorporates a strategic outlook, support of top management, attention to business planning, and early consensus among planning members.     

Industry modelling

Industry models are used for a variety of purposes including: forecasting markets for strategic planning, providing a basis for directing investments by financial institutions and governments and the development of contingency plans by companies. This paper assesses industry models along two different dimensions, that of the missions fulfilled by the model and that of the problems encountered in the construction of the model: in effect a market and a production orientation respectively. An attempt is made to identify potentially fruitful directions for further developments.     

Strategic planning catches on in U.S. retailers

This article examines the strategic planning practices of large American retailers. Most retailers surveyed have engaged in strategic planning, almost one-third have hired employees whose main jobs are strategic planning and over two-thirds use outside consultants. Top management participation is also high, the scope of strategic planning is broad both internally and externally, and several standard strategic planning methods are used. Moreover, in spite of the rapid pace of change in retailing, over half of the retailers use long-range time frames. They recognize the value of strategic planning because almost three-quarters intend to increase their emphasis in this area.