Strategic planning

Tareq al-Suwaidan defines planning as a decision about the direction of the future, fixing three things: where we are today, where we want to reach, and how we get there; strategic planning begins at sector level and above and spans five years or more ^{1 2}.

He explains that the dividing line between strategic and operational planning is the sector level: there is no strategic plan for a department or a section, and a strategic plan is never shorter than five years while an operational one is usually a year; the vocabulary differs too: vision, mission, values and long-range goals against annual priorities, budgets, policies and procedures ^{3 4}. He adds that strategic planning is the planning apparatus's responsibility, while operational planning belongs to the department or section itself ⁵.

He says there are thirteen known scientific methods for strategic planning — among them scenario planning, PMSP, competing-for-the-future, SWOT and Pfeiffer's method — that 87 per cent of the world's plans are written with SWOT because people know nothing else, and that 70 per cent of strategic plans written with SWOT failed (needs_source: the two figures are the speaker's) ^{6 7}. He presents Pfeiffer's method from the book Applied Strategic Planning, adjusted by his own experience; its first step is 'planning to plan': forming a team of five to seven including people who understand the core business, the competitors, finance, information technology, human resources, marketing and planning ^{8 9}.

Among his rules: the planning team's work never exceeds six months however large the organisation; a plan spans five years for a small organisation, ten for a medium one and fifteen or twenty for a large one — except IT companies, which never plan beyond three years because change is so fast ^{10 11}. The decision-maker is not a member of the team; the team meets him after each step to lay out the alternatives ¹². And the 'values review' — values meaning what the organisation holds valuable, not ethics — is done only for a new organisation or one whose leadership has changed ^{13 14}.