Strategic Planning

Solution Preview

This response is also attached, along with a highly supportive articles.

RESPONSE:

Let's take a closer look at these interesting questions!

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a formal strategic planning process?

Advantages -

The formal strategic planning process is a very detailed thought process used to assess the market, your competitors, and your company's position, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

· Putting a detailed plan together will realize your full potential in several ways.

· Strategic planning can help to articulate, affirm and develop an organization's aspirations and strategy to increase the likelihood of success. Simply put, strategic planning gives you direction and guides behavior through a step-by-step process.

· It determines where an organization is going, how it's going to get there and how it will know if it got there or not.

· It provides clear objectives that act a measure of success (Did we meet this objective successfully?) or suggests areas that might need to be re-worked and/or changed (e.g., If not, what can we do differently? What needs to be changed or adjusted?) http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/asp/uploads/uploadedfiles/3/340/impperfbackground2.pdf

Disadvantages -

· Not implementing the plan and wasting the time making the plan in the first place could be two disadvantages. If you believe that you won't stick to a plan anyway then the time it takes would be a disadvantage. And in these two cases, a strategic plan would be a waste of time. http://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=13168#82996

· Other disadvantages of a plan could exist if the users do not react to outside variables and adjust the formalized plan as a group when needed. Some businesses work their formalized business plan for months, without changes to it, even though the competitors adjusted and changed their strategy. The implementation period of a formalized plan is usually over a long period of time and a plan will become ineffective if the users are more concerned with working the plan as oppose to reacting to changes based in the market. So, a formalized business plan cannot be so formalized that changes cannot be made if appropriate. It is hard to manage all the important variables in a business plan, but it through the proper management and ...