What is strategic planning? Strategic planning is a process to establish a vision and common goals for a business. The biggest reason why owners or founders do strategic planning is to get everyone to understand the business plan and act on it. 

A strategic planning process involves listing key initiatives like tactical and process-driven activities. It generally ensures that business growth activities are effective, purposeful, and intentional.  This unifies the team and eases the process of reaching set goals.    

A framework for making this kind of plan helps to:

1. Share resources well
2. Have a clear path on how to reach set goals 
3. Maximize impact

The Epirus Ventures team continuously employs replicable and easy-to-use frameworks in its operation. This proves to work much better than complex and technical processes. Examples of such useful frameworks are: 

The SMART Framework

The SMART framework comes into play when assigning measurable metrics to future goals. 

It enables us to create actionable tactics and processes to help us reach specific goals. The framework also importantly removes guesswork from the strategic planning process. 

Each letter in the acronym SMART represents a word that forms part of the strategy. With this, S stands for Specific, M stands for Measurable, A stands for Attainable, R stands for Relevant, and T stands for Time-bound. Here are the questions to ask on these points:

1. Specific — What exactly do we want to achieve?
2. Measurable — Which relevant metrics does this include?
3. Attainable — Do we have the resources, skills, and knowledge to achieve the goal?
4. Relevant — Are the objectives worthwhile? How will the organization benefit?
5. Time-bound — What’s a realistic end date? Will it create positive motivation?

The OKR Framework

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is a goal-setting framework that is designed to keep teams aligned on a common goal. 

As described by its name, OKR supports a straightforward approach that outlines key results and objectives which must be achieved on the way to getting those results. It is like defining the desired outcome of a business or a particular project, and then highlighting notable milestones. 

This strategic planning framework goes beyond looking at outputs to creating process checkpoints. Furthermore, it removes distractions that do not help achieve the goal. These distractions could be in the form of good ideas. But, such ideas overload our time more than they help us to achieve set objectives. 

Key Result

A significant and concrete aim must be provided as the key result of a business plan or project. Achieving this would mean that the project has been completed. In essence, the question we need to ask here is “where do we want to go?” 

Objectives

For framework objectives, it is necessary to ask how a business would know if they are making progress. Objectives are typically measurable outcomes that contain a metric, with a start and target value. 

Initiatives 

What will I do to get there? This is the question that helps us build initiatives. An initiative describes what we need to do to achieve our key result. They are all projects and tasks that are necessary to get there. 

The Goal Pyramid Framework

The Goal Pyramid is a top-to-bottom approach that ensures that resources, execution, and strategies are all goal-focused. Its structure allows flexibility and can be used to make strategic plans that are actionable and accountable. 

Goal 

The pyramid starts with a single SMART Goal at the top. This happens to be the first point of consideration, because having the right goal means that you are heading in the right direction. 

Strategies

Once you are set on your goals, the next step would be to come up with one or more strategies. The accuracy of your strategies and the creativity in them will determine how effective they are in helping you achieve your goal. 

Execution

The execution layer in the Goal Pyramid describes ongoing processes and one-time tactics. If done right, this will help fulfill a strategy and deliver on the goal. 

Resources

At the last stage of the Goal Pyramid is getting resources. These resources and tools would help us execute strategy and deliver on the goal. 

How Does Failing To Do Strategic Planning Affect Businesses?

Failing to produce a clear strategy leads to  inefficiency in business. This limits a company’s ability to grow. It also creates:

1. Inefficient use of resources such as time and capital,
2. Lack of clarity among the team in regards to goals and objectives,
3. Inability to link efforts to desired outcomes.