The concern in this chapter is to bring together various considerations that affect the planning process and the success of strategic planning to create a summary list of factors that it may be possible to correct and that may need clarification by survey. There is also a review of the key information elements from the literature in order to isolate the sort of information that is common to the different approaches and would be most useful to any strategic plan.
TopRegarding The Strategic Planning Process
Beinhocker and Kaplan (2002) agree with Mintzberg (1994) that the formal strategic planning process is a waste of time and their primary criticism is that strategy formulation, i.e. new directions for the organisation, cannot be developed by a planning process, the strategies need to be innovative and developed in a creative way.
The answer perhaps is that the concept of strategic planning should be broken into three separate phases, as suggested by authors Lynch (2003) and Roney (2004), these phases might be described as follows:
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Developing strategic initiatives – (creative brainstorming, or developing audacious, entrepreneurial goals). The term ‘initiatives’ is used to convey the concept of creating new ideas.
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Validating initiatives against organisational and environmental information.
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Developing an implementation plan.
Using the architectural principles to structure the strategic planning documentation is intended as a solution for the last phase of the planning process when documenting the plan for implementation of the adopted strategic initiatives. Separating the phases in this way allows each phase to be treated in a different way and managed separately. The senior executives may develop the creative initiatives, which could be passed to the senior managers to validate against the current organisational capabilities and marketing situation, this might easily be an iterative process until both groups are satisfied. Once the initiatives have been clarified and objectives and success factors refined, the information can be passed out to the organisation to determine the action plans required and the performance indicators needed to monitor progress. This may result in a further round of iteration until all parties are satisfied that the objectives are achievable within the budget and timetable proposed. The advantage of this approach is that many members of the organisation now understand the requirements and more likely to be committed to achieve them. This solves several of the key problems that have bedeviled strategic planning processes, which are the lack of buy in by top executives and lack of understanding by the staff that must implement the requirements.