Organizations are always looking for ways to improve. It’s how they stay relevant and, more importantly, profitable. But you don’t get better just by desiring it. It takes strategy, and then a model to implement that strategy. No surprise, there are models to accomplish this called strategic planning models. They’re great for businesses, big and small, and assist in project planning and implementing organizational goals in a thorough and structured manner. Once you have decided on an objective, then you must plan a model that will execute it successfully. There are quite a few strategic planning models, and they can be very different from one another. Often the type of organization will dictate which strategic planning model is used. After a brief explanation, we’ll dig into five of the more popular ones. You’re sure to find a strategic planning model among them that works for you. What is a Strategic Planning Model? It’s easy to define what a strategic planning model is because the definition is embedded in its name! A strategic planning model is how an organization takes its strategy and creates a plan to implement it to improve operations and better meet their goals. How they get to this point requires identifying what the company wants, and how it hopes to achieve those goals in the near term. Once they have that target clearly defined, then it’s a matter of working backwards to figure out how to get there. This, of course, is easy to say and extremely difficult to do. In fact, sometimes the complexity involved in trying to put together a plan to strategically meet your goals can feel like it needs a strategic planning model all its own! That’s why there are classic models already in place to help you accomplish your goals. Do You Need a Strategic Planning Model? If all this sounds like a fancy way of saying you need a plan to achieve your goals, well, you’re right. But that doesn’t dismiss its usefulness in achieving those objectives. No matter if you’re a startup or an established, market-dominant brand, if you don’t have a plan to reach your goals, you’re bound to fail. That could be losing market share or shuttering, neither of which is a path forward for a viable enterprise. The benefits of having a strategic planning model are manyfold. For one, it provides a clear path that the organization uses and shares with everyone on its staff. Having all departments work together for a common goal is powerful. The opposite is disastrous. You can’t hit your target, whether it’s a year or five or 10 years in the future, if everyone doesn’t know what it is and how you plan to get there. Think of it as being focused. There are a lot of distractions that occur everyday in every business. Knowing what your topline is helps you prioritize and keep your energies directed on the overall strategy for the company. Another positive from having a strategic planning model is that it improves your knowledge of what works best in the organization. You know your strengths and weaknesses, as well as getting a clear picture of where you are in the marketplace. It even helps you get a clear idea of who your competition is and how you can differentiate yourself from them. Best Practices for Strategic Planning Models We’ll get to the examples in a moment, but regardless of which you choose as most appropriate for your needs, there are best practices to make sure you succeed. When doing the research, assemble a group that is diverse but also appropriate for the goal. Diversity brings more ideas to the table. You’ll want between six and 10 people. Once you start, give it time. The team needs to come up with creative solutions, and then season them, to make sure they’re the right course of action. You might want to remove the team from the work site. A change of environment, without the distractions of the office, can help them settle into a more contemplative state where they can come up with better ideas. Of course, you need to get buy-in from the team or else your hard work will be for naught. Once you have them fully on board, build trust. You want everyone to participate, and to do so in a free and open discussion. That means from the boss on down. It might help to hire an outside facilitator to manage the process. When you have a plan, it must be realistic. If you can’t execute it, then you’ve not done your job. Therefore, it must be actionable, with clearly defined goals, tasks, responsibilities outlined, accountability, deadlines—and all this must be clear to everyone involved. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible. Plans change, so it’s best to not be rigid about it. Finally, don’t think of creating a strategic planning model for your business as a one-and-done process. Not only must your plan be open to edit as internal and external forces demand, but these meetings should be regularly scheduled. Think of it as a process. Meet monthly if you can, or at least quarterly. You can discuss how the plan is being executed and hold people accountable for what they’ve been tasked to execute. This is how you make sure your plan becomes a reality. 5 Popular Strategic Planning Models As we said, there are many models, and we deeply encourage you to go down that rabbit hole. You never know what you might find. But for our purposes, let’s narrow the scope down to five with proven results. 1. Alignment Model This strategic alignment model (SAM) is among the most used. It’s made up of two parts—strategic fit and functional integration. What that means is that the model aligns business and IT strategies. To do this requires identifying the key goals of an organization and then what the steps are to reach those goals. The plan must maximize the process to best achieve those goals. There are four perspectives to guide you in this model: Strategy execution, which is that the business strategy is driving the model. Technology potential, which also sees the business strategy as the driver, but with an IT strategy to support it. Competitive potential deals with using emerging IT capabilities to create new products and services. Lastly, there’s the service level, which is focused on creating the best IT system in the organization. Here, business strategy is important, but only the launching pad. 2. Balanced Scorecard The balanced scorecard (BSC) is made up of clear communications on what is being accomplished. It aligns the work with overall strategy, and prioritizes, measures and monitors progress. The idea is that the model balances strategy with financial measurements. One of the reasons to use BSC is that it helps you see the connections between various parts of your strategic management and planning. Using BSC means exploring four different aspects of your organization. One is the financial performance of the company and what financial resources have been most effective. You also want to gauge the performance of your stakeholders or customers and how you serve them. Internal processes should be judged on their efficiency, too, but also quality. Then there’s the organizational capacity, which looks at your personnel, infrastructure, tech, culture and whatever else can be used to meet your goals. 3. Basic Model Also called the simple model, this one is often used by newer organizations who don’t have a history of strategic planning to help guide them in making decisions. But it’s also a fine model for any organization that doesn’t have the time or resources to spend on deep and extensive strategic planning. First, you establish the mission statement for your organization, if you don’t already have one. That is, a summary of your goals that is created to inspire and transform the organization. Next, you want to figure out what goals must be achieved in order to fulfill the mission statement. From that, break down the tasks that will reach those goals. Schedule, monitor and report on your progress. 4. Blue Ocean Strategy The blue ocean strategy is designed for taking your product to a market where there is none or little competition. Therefore, the research is heavily tilted towards finding a niche that can be exploited for profit, such as where there are few businesses offering a product people have expressed an interest in, and there is little to no pricing pressure. Unlike red ocean strategy, which describes a market that is saturated and products are threatened by pricing pressure that could threaten the business, blue ocean strategy looks for markets where there is room to grow. You’re looking to capture new demand, where your product is either unique or so much better as to make competition irrelevant. 5. Issue (Or Goal) Based The issue-based model (also called goal-based) is the next step up from the basic strategic planning model. It builds on the basic model and is intended for businesses that are more established. Thus, it’s more in-depth and possibly the most popular of all the models we’ve highlighted. To begin, use a SWOT analysis, which is an acronym standing for Strengths, Weaknesses and Threats Analysis. It helps you identify and analyze internal and external factors that impact your business, product or service. Next comes the mission statement, then planning, creating a budget and a schedule to implement it. After a year, you’ll want to monitor the results and report on its progress, making adjustments as needed. How ProjectManager.com Executes Strategic Planning Models Now that you know about strategic planning models, and have chosen one to reach your organization’s objective, you have a lot of work ahead of you. ProjectManager.com is an award-winning tool that organizes strategic plans, so you can execute, monitor and report on their progress. Start Planning In-Depth with Gantt Charts You have decided on your target, now you need to know how you get there. That’s as simple as breaking down the goal into realistic tasks, or steps, that end at your objective. You can use a work breakdown structure or collect them on a spreadsheet. Now the fun starts. Upload your tasks into our software, and you get to the planning part of your strategic planning model. Add duration to your tasks, and they instantly populate the Gantt chart tool timeline. Now, you can see your whole project from start to finish. Add priorities, so your team knows what’s important, and break up the project into phases with our milestone feature. There’s a space on each task to write descriptions that guide your team, and they can collaborate by commenting with one another at the task level to facilitate productivity. Multiple Views to Tackle Your Projects There are many ways to work, and we have many tools to get that work done. Besides the Gantt, you can use a task list, calendar or kanban board to manage your work. The board view is especially helpful, as it breaks production into phases and provides transparency into the process, so you can keep traffic flowing and avoid costly bottlenecks. Monitor Your Progress with Real-Time Dashboards Part of any strategic planning model is not just the planning and execution, but monitoring progress to make sure you’re hitting your targets. We have a real-time dashboard that tracks several project metrics, including project variance, which is automatically calculates your planned vs. actual progress. To keep management updated, we have one-click reporting, which can be easily filtered and shared, so stakeholders get only the information they’re looking for. ProjectManager.com is a cloud-based software made to help teams and projects get better organized. We help you deliver on your strategic plan with tools to help you through every phase of the project. See why tens of thousands of teams are already using our software and take our free 30-day trial today. 3 Best Project Management Charts for Project Planning Project Plan Template Project Planning for Beginners Best Project Planning Software of 2020