Strategic Planning

The need to study planning starting from the area of strategic planning has been necessitated by three main reasons:

•    Strategic planning has increasingly become a fact of organizational life. The presence of a strategic plan or the lack of one is usually the starting point in understanding and evaluating the work of managers. When you think about an organization, the first thing that you are likely to reflect on is "what is its strategy?"

•    Strategic planning provides the basic framework within which other forms of planning should take place (all activities of an organization depend on its strategy).

•    An understanding of strategic planning makes it easier to understand the other forms of planning.

A vital component in the strategy of strategic planning is the organizational goals. Without a clear grasp of these, the study of strategic planning can prove very difficult.

Organizational goals provide the basic sense of direction for the activities of that organization. The term goals is used to include purpose, mission and objectives terms which most people use interchangeably.

Purpose is the primary role of an organization as defined by the society in which it operates. It is a broad aim that applies not only to a given organization but to all organizations of its type in that society. For example we could say that in Kenya the purposes of all hospitals is to provide Health Care.