Strategic Planning

This is a methodical process of visualizing a preferred future, converting this vision into broadly defined goals or objectives, and then outlining a series of actions to accomplish those goals. This is the procedure through which an organization determines its strategy, or direction, and decides how to allocate its resources to execute this goal.

It is through this process that an organization's leaders decide WHAT and HOW they want it to be in the future. Simply said, strategic planning establishes an organization's direction over the course of the upcoming year or longer, as well as how it will get there and gauge its success.

Setting priorities, concentrating efforts and resources, bolstering operations, ensuring that staff members and other stakeholders are working toward shared objectives, establishing consensus regarding intended outcomes/results, assessing, and adjusting the organization's direction in response to a changing environment are all done through this management activity.

In general, strategic planning is a methodical process that results in fundamental choices and actions that, with an eye toward the future, define and direct what an organization is, who it serves, what it does, and why it does it. Effective strategic planning lays out not only the direction an organization is moving in and the steps that must be taken to move forward, but also the metrics by which it will judge its success.