Strategic Planning

Primary Components

Strategic Management is a useful tool and necessary for all organizations in order to determine which approaches will prove most beneficial for desired achievement of goals. The strategies are generally geared towards the concepts of better performance and evaluation of competition. Strategic management plans typically consist of roughly four key components that help analyze and establish market positions within an organizations respected industry. These components are environmental scanning, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategy evaluation.

Environmental scanning is the process of gathering information from all facets that directly and indirectly affect the business being run by an organization. The information is than assessed and analyzed to determine key factors of importance within an organization's respected industry that have an external or internal influence on that organization. Once the information has been gathered, the key points of interest will be dissected and than incorporated into the strategic management plans for the organizations benefits.

Strategy formulation is another component that helps define the target goals of an organization. Strategy formulation gives management the ability to take results from the environmental scanning process and come to a conclusion that will allow the organization which angle or course of action is best suited to accomplish particular target goals.

Strategy implementation is self-explanatory in the sense that it is the process of selecting the chosen strategy and fully integrating it and doing everything possible to make sure the strategy is a success. This process also includes that actual business running day-to-day operations that consist of a successful organization. A structure and culture is developed along with an intact management team making decisions and guiding operation procedures as well as establishing human resources.

Strategy evaluation is used as a tactic that utilizes a metric system to evaluate the progress of the strategic plan that has been implemented. During this process, the whole strategy is evaluated and assessed to understand what is and is not working to the benefit with the company. Once the positives and negatives have been sorted out, a concentration is applied to the negatives in effort to take corrective action to adjust to these errors and make them have