Concord Consulting Corporation
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Strategic Planning Process

The ability to set and implement business strategy is the key skill of leadership - it determines everything else that happens within the organization. Leaders must learn the key elements of strategic thinking and strategic planning for both themselves and their organization: how to determine key strategic objectives, how to plan, and how to organize resources to achieve objectives.

Strategic planning is a process that extracts out of the minds of people who run the organization their best thinking about what is happening in the business, what is happening in the environment, and how to position the organization in view of those variables. This then helps them to make vital choices, such as which products or services to pursue and not to pursue, which markets to seek and not to seek, and which customers to offer and not to offer our products or services to. It enables management to position the organization in order to survive and prosper within a constantly changing environment.

Any organization, through its leaders, can become more skilled at planning for both the expected and unexpected by implementing a strategic planning and management process that includes the following:
  1. Developing a Vision - a picture of a preferred future state, a description of what the organization would like to be some years from now. The Vision provides the context for designing and managing the changes that will be necessary to reach those goals
  2. Preparing a mission that summarizes what it does, where it does it, and for whom; recognizing the purpose that the organization is attempting to fulfill in society, the economy, or both
  3. Identifying values that describe how you will do what you do; the organization's philosophy of operations, the assumptions that the organization ordinarily uses in its operations (i.e. your positions on quality, service, people, innovation)
  4. Defining and confirming your core competencies - your unique abilities that separate you from competitors or similar organizations - and determining how to leverage them for competitive advantage
  5. Realistically assessing your strengths and weaknesses/vulnerabilities
  6. Identifying minor and major opportunities
  7. Developing objectives to synthesize the key necessary initiatives from the above analysis, and establishing strategic priorities
  8. Preparing strategic action plans to execute the key objectives and priorities
Contact us to discuss how a strategic planning process could serve your organization. We are able to quickly define an appropriate process that meets the organization's needs, budget, and time availability.

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