Purposes and Benefits of Strategic Planning Essay

Purposes and Benefits of Strategic Planning - Essay Example Another purpose is that it doesn't allow the firm to get distracted by the prevailing conditions whether good or bad, it is a job of Manager who has done strategic planning of the firm to ensure that all the necessary activities are carried out in a planned way so that no obstruction occurs. "Strategic objectives are normally ones to be achieved over the medium to long term. They may be financial such as a certain increase in earnings per share or non financial such as a percentage increase in market share. In theory they should be capable of being quantifiable and hence susceptible to measurement" (p. 11) "In business strategy involves forming a path for the organization to follow that will lead to products or services that customer will want. This will usually mean some kind of new departure for the business, requiring the leader to implement various tactics or sub-strategies. These tactics are usually set out in the component parts of the business plan" (Hoddler, Stoughton, 2003: 20). The strategic planning process consists of two phases, the first one is strategy formulation stage, and the second one is strategy implementation stage, in the first phase we have to identify mission and strategic goals of business, of course when someone wouldn't know where someone is going, how could someone will get courage of moving forward, the second thing we have to care about is conducting competitive analysis, here we have to analyze the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT Analysis), than the last part of first phase appears in which there is a need of developing specific strategies, the three of them are corporate, business and functional levels of strategies. In the corporate level of strategy, which tells about what businesses the organization will operate and how resources would be allocated, the second one is business level strategy that tries to define the best means of competing within a business, it also supports the corporate level stra tegy, the third one is the functional level strategy which focuses on the specific action plans for managing a specific functional area within a business, it supports the business level strategy. The second phase of planning process is strategy implementation stage in which all that is planned previously is implemented on actual situations, it means exactly to evaluate the plans and control afterwards where required. Difference between Strategic and short- term planning As mentioned earlier, the Strategic Planning is a long term planning, it consists of time that is longer than one year, more formally such planning is done while considering all the past records and resources that the company or organization has, the strategic planning is basically coping with the company's "strategy Formulation" stage in which the company has more concerns on its mission and goal statement, its SWOT analysis and other specific