You've decided it's time to do some business planning — and that's great! But before you jump in with both feet, it makes sense to explore strategic vs operational planning to figure out which type of plan will serve your organization best.
In fact, before you hold even one meeting or make that first keystroke, spend some time determining why you're creating a plan and how you will use it.
To start, ask yourself these four questions:
Your answers will help settle the strategic vs operational planning debate and, in the meantime, here is a top-line of the key differences:
Strategic plans aim to focus an organization’s vision and priorities in response to a changing environment, and to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals.
Many strategic plans consider a range of future outcomes, trends and unknowns to arrive at a set of strategies that best use organizational resources.
Most strategic plans incorporate a SWOT Analysis into the planning process to help develop strategies around organizational strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats that exist in the external environment.
Many times, the strategic planning process taps into knowledge from diverse stakeholder groups who can help navigate the unknowns and future. This broad perspective is helpful for better understanding the external environment and in developing strategies.
Simply put, strategic planning is a continuous process that guides organizational action and behavior.
Most operational or business plans are focused on short-term objectives.
Operational plans provide a detailed road map that outlines how activities will be accomplished and by whom. In other words, operational plans are highly tactical.
Additionally, operational plans view the future as known - a perspective that enables the organization to take action toward implementing specific activities.
Organizations ultimately need to conduct both periodic strategic planning and more frequent operational planning, but your answers to the four key questions we started with, plus the descriptions of both types of plans, can shed light on what type of plan your organization needs RIGHT NOW.
If it's a strategic plan, start with the big picture and then create your operational plan when it's time to take action against specific short-term goals.
If it's an operational plan that's needed immediately, but you also do not have a strategic plan in place, consider setting aside time in the near future to begin to work on your organization's big picture, too.
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