Planning to Succeed: Fundamentals of Strategic Planning

Description

Fail to plan, plan to fail. We've all heard that piece of wisdom before. It's true in our personal lives and well as for organizations. Combining two activities, thinking strategically and long term planning, strategic planning can provide goals, communicate priorities, and keep an organization focused on what is important. Successful organizations have learned that a few people in a conference room cannot develop a strategic plan. Whether you are leading a planning effort, participating on a planning team, or just need to understand your organization's strategic plan, this course will provide the fundamentals to build upon. In this course, students will learn the importance of strategic planning and who should be involved. Students will be taught how to build a model for strategic plans and a methodology for creating a strategic plan. Students will also learn how to evaluate the external and internal environment of your organization as well as how to ensure that the organization will follow the plan. The importance and differences between business level, corporate level, and functional level strategies will also be covered.

Objectives

• You will be able to describe the basics of strategic planning, form a strategic planning team and list the eight steps of preferred futuring.
• You will be able to describe the preferred futuring process.
• You will be able to employ tools to develop vision, goals, action plans and structure for implementation.
• You will be able to address the practicalities of strategic planning such as preparing for roadblocks, ensuring execution and preparikng for preferred futuring in your organization.

Book

Preparing to Plan

For Topic 1: Introduction and Chapter 1

For Topic 2: No reading assignment

For Topic 3: Pages 110-112

For Topic 4: Chapter 2

Futuring Step-By-Step

For Topic 1: Review History, read chapter 3.

For Topic 2: What's Working, What's Not, read Chapter 4.

For Topic 3: Values and Beliefs, read Chapter 5. 

For Topic 4: Events, Developments and Trends, read Chapter 6.

Time for Visions and Plans

For Topic 1: Preferred Future Vision, read Chapter 7.

For Topic 2: Action Goals, read Chapter 8.

For Topic 3: Plan for Action, read Chapter 9.

For Topic 4: Create a Structure for Implementation, read Chapter 10.

Practicalities of Strategic Planning

For Topic 1: Preparing for Roadblocks, read Chapter 11.

For Topic 2: What about Execution, there is no reading assignment.

For Topic 3: Back to Reality, read Chapter 12.

All content of this document is copyrighted by IDEA Solutions and the author. All rights reserved. Content may not be used without permission.