It is necessary that every organization has a Strategic Plan, although sometimes it is thought that the mission and vision of a company, is part of the decor of the reception room.
This Strategic Plan helps the leaders of an organization to shape the direction they want to give to the company, and when this plan is transmitted to the entire organization, it will generate synergies in all staff to achieve their objectives. Likewise, this plan helps each worker to know where they want to go and commit to that destination.
DETERMINE THE DIRECTION: It is important that the vision of the company embodied in the Strategic Plan is always motivating and challenging, such as the one that Bill Gates had in the eighties, where the vision was: that all homes in the world use personal computers and work with it a Microsoft software.
Therefore, these visions nourish all workers, gives a direction to an organization and that is why it is important to define them to know how to reach the goal (methods), with what values and with what behavior to work.
DETERMINATION OF THE CURRENT SITUATION: After knowing where we want to go, an analysis must be made to know the current situation of the organization to know what are its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Some useful management tools for this are the matrices such as: MADE (Analysis and External Diagnosis Matrix), MADI (Analysis and Internal Diagnosis Matrix), and finally the SWOT Matrix.
STRATEGY FORMULATION: Subsequently, it is necessary to define HOW TO ACHIEVE the goals set. The first step is to define the intermediate goals, because one cannot go directly to the final objectives, and as these objectives are reached, they are expanded until they reach the final vision, always keeping a control through indicators.
All companies must have a Strategic Plan, whether large or small, NGOs and even each person must have it because this plan defines the direction in which his life leads. When companies do not have a strategic plan, each member of the organization goes their own way without knowing the goals they want to achieve as an organization.
To increase the productivity of the collaborators
Even transnationals such as Coca Cola, Nike, Adidas, among others, are the first to have strategic plans since they set goals to expand markets, to diversify products, to introduce new products, to reach new markets or expand their operations to other areas such as Social Responsibility for example, when first their operations have already been consolidated.
In general, in order to make a Strategic Plan, the following recommendations must be taken into account:
- It should be carried out by the same executives or directors and without any external agent that imposes the activities, but with a facilitator that helps to align the objectives of the interested parties.
- This facilitator should also help to make a good analysis of the current reality of the company, which makes its competition, the customers you want, suppliers, as this the market in general, the sector, the environment etc..
- There must be a good communication of this Strategic Plan and an active participation of the workers, according to the different levels although starting by defining the Macro Objectives.
