Course Description

Strategic Planning is a proactive and productive, strategic planning method for organizations, departments, or teams. Learn an eight-step, strategic planning process and facilitate strategic planning by teams. IT is a logical, orderly, innovative, easy-to-learn-and-use approach to strategic planning. The process includes three phases: (1) The Strategic Plan; (2) The Tactical Plan and (3) The Operational Plan. Sequential steps guide the team through each phase.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, participant will be able to:

• Define strategic planning and describe the common components of a strategic plan.
• Describe the role that strategic planning plays in enabling long-term success.
• Identify how strategic planning differs from other forms of organizational planning.
• Develop strategic-thinking skills in oneself and others.
• Apply the key stages of the strategic-planning process.
• Identify methods for involving stakeholders in strategy formulation and implementation.
• Describe common obstacles to strategic planning and ways to overcome these obstacles.
• Identify common obstacles to effective problem solving and decision making.
• Apply the principles of effective problem solving and decision making to real-life situations.
• Describe the seven-step model for strategic problem solving.
• Apply the strategic problem-solving model to a specific situation.
• Write a clear problem statement.
• Describe the seven-step model for strategic decision making.
• Discuss strategies and methods for involving diverse stakeholders in strategic problem solving and decision making.
• Identify more than a dozen tools/methods for strategic problem solving and decision making.
• Practice and apply at least six of the tools to the issues, challenges, or problems currently facing your organization.
• Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of the tools.
• Identify future opportunities for applying the tools to current and future situations, challenges, and opportunities.
• Recognize the difference between strategy formulation and strategy implementation.
• Identify methods for developing a shared vision.
• Identify the core values or guiding principles that support the shared vision and accomplish the strategic agenda.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis that enables a better understanding of the organization’s internal and external environments.
• Select the key strategic issues that become the organization’s strategic agenda.
• Develop action plans that move the organization toward the vision/mission.
• Deal effectively with emergent issues and an unknowable future.
• Describe the role that strategic thinking plays in the long-term success of an organization.
• Identify the competencies of strategic thinking.
• Develop a strategic issues mindmap that identifies key strategic issues facing the organization today and likely to affect it in the future.
• Develop a personal plan for adjusting current and future decisions and behavior to reflect the results of becoming more of a strategic thinker.

Who Can Benefit

• Managers with strategic planning responsibility. 
• Business unit or departmental managers.