Strategic Planning and Operational Planning

A. Strategic planning 

It is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.

In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan."

While strategic planning may be used to effectively plot a company's longer-term direction, one cannot use it to reliably forecast how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the immediate future. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the "strategic plan" have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.

Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

1. "What do we do?"
2. "For whom do we do it?"
3. "How do we excel?"

In business strategic planning, some authors phrase the third question as "How can we beat or avoid competition?" (Bradford and Duncan, page 1). But this approach is more about defeating competitors than about excelling.

In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or—more typically—3 to 5 years (long term), although some extend their vision to 20 years.

B. Operational Planning

It Is a plan that focuses on the planning of tactical plans to achieve operational objectives. Developed by middle-level and lower-level managers, the operational plan has a short-term focus and relatively more narrow scope. Each operational plans in connection with a series of small activities.

It describes short-term business strategies; it explains how a strategic plan will be put into operation (or what portion of a strategic plan will
be addressed) during a given operational period (fiscal year). An operational plan is the basis for and justification of an annual operating budget request. Therefore, a strategic plan that has a five-year lifetime would drive five operational plans funded by five operating budgets

operational planning is divided into : 

- Disposable plan: developed to carry out a series of actions that can not be repeated in future

  Programs: the plan used for a series of major

  Project activities: a disposable plan to narrow the scope and less complex than the program

- The plan remains: developed for repetitive activity on a regular basis over a period of time

   Policy: Plan detailing responses remain common organization for the problem or situation

   Standard operating procedures: fixed plan outlining the steps to be followed in certain situations

   Rules and regulations: fixed a plan that describes exactly how the specific activities undertaken

Why Is an Operational Plan Important?

An Operational Plan ensures you can successfully implement your Action and Monitoring plans by getting your team to:

• Prepare your project to raise funds, being clear about how you will get the resources (see Step 3.2) and arming you with a convincing plan to review with existing and potential donors.

• Use resources efficiently, to help allocate scarce resources to the most critical gaps and needs.

• Clearly define your capacity gaps and most critical resource requirements.

• Reduce risks where possible, and prepare contingency plans where necessary.

• Think about the long term future of the project, including how you will ensure sustainability of your project’s targets and impacts. 

The scope of planning influenced by the dimensions of time, space, and technical level of planning. These three dimensions interact. Each dimension is the following sources:

1.       Planning the time dimension

a.       Long-term planning

b.      Medium-term planning

c.       Short-term planning

2.       Planning the social dimension

a.       National planning

b.      Regional planning

c.       Spatial planning

3.       Planning dimensional planning level

a.       Macro planning

b.      Micro planning

c.       Sectoral planning

d.      Region planning

e.      Planning the project

4.       Planning type of dimension

a.       Planning from top to bottom

b.      Planning from the bottom up

c.       Planning for the attack to the side

d.      Landscape planning

e.      Planning up top-down and bottom combined

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