Strategic Management & Strategic Planning Process

Definition

1. “Strategic management process is a method by which managers conceive of and implement a strategy that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage.”[1]
2. “It is a process by which an organization establishes its objectives, formulates actions (strategies) designed to meet these objectives in the desired timescale, implements the actions, and assesses progress and results.”[2]
3. “Strategic planning process is a systematic or emerged way of performing strategic planning in the organization through initial assessment, thorough analysis, strategy formulation, its implementation and evaluation.”

What is that strategic planning process?

The process of strategic management lists what steps the managers should take to create a complete strategy and how to implement that strategy successfully in the company. It might comprise from 7 to nearly 30 steps[4] and tends to be more formal in well-established organizations.

The ways that strategies are created and realized differ. Thus, there are many different models of the process. The models vary between companies depending upon:

• Organization’s culture.
• Leadership style.
• The experience the firm has in creating successful strategies.

All the examples of the process in this article represent top-down approach and belong to the ‘design school’.

Components of strategic planning process

There are many components of the process which are spread throughout strategic planning stages. Most often, the strategic planning process has 4 common phases: strategic analysis, strategy formulation, implementation and monitoring (David[5], Johnson, Scholes & Whittington[6], Rothaermel[1], Thompson and Martin[2]). For clearer understanding, this article represents 5 stages of strategic planning process:

• Initial Assessment
• Situation Analysis
• Strategy Formulation
• Strategy Implementation
• Strategy Monitoring