““Strategic Planning Today: A Six-Step Process The strategic planning process offers incredible benefits if we pursue it correctly. The following six steps constitute one version of the process: mission, objective, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and control. The first step in the process is to define your mission; as we saw at the beginning of this lecture, this is the core that guides you. Your mission is what you look to in setting your objectives. The objectives established in the second step are chosen based on some notion of wanting to fulfill your mission. They should be clear, concise, achievable, and in some sense, measurable. The third step, the environmental scan, is pivotal for most firms, and it is the most involved. Look at both the external and internal environments in which your firm functions. On a personal level, evaluate the external factors that impinge on you with respect to your objectives. The fourth step is the actual formulation of strategy. Decide what you will actually do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Allocate resources and connect your management decisions with the people who will implement the plan. The fifth step is implementation of strategy, and here is where many companies fail because they do not follow the military dictum to “supervise and refine.” This means not to simply issue orders and assume that they’ll be carried out. The sixth step, control, involves developing a control mechanism to evaluate whether or not the plan is working. When the control or monitoring system tells you that something is amiss in your strategy, you can then circle back to your environmental scan to discover whether the relevant environmental factors have changed.””
