Eddielogic

– Thoughts on Strategy and Management

Problems and barriers to strategic planning and proposals for solutions

OliverAs you might have noticed from one of my blog posts I am an external PhD-student of the Warsaw School of Economics / Institute for Organization and Management in Industry. My research topic focuses on the strategic planning of European retail banks. As part of my studies I was given the opportunity to present some of my research findings in the institute’s journal “Economics and Organization of Enterprise”. My last paper was titled “Problems and barriers to strategic planning”.

In my paper I analyze and summarize the existing problems and barriers related to the strategic planning process. In the last two decades a large number of articles and books related to this matter have been published. Taking the number of publications into consideration it could be argued that the relevance of strategic planning process is unquestioned and would need no further explanation. But still research results – including new ones – from different studies express that a “duality” of strategic planning still exits. On one side the relevance of the strategic planning process for developing organization’s strategy is described as very important. On the other side a number of concerns and problems when running that process can be found. Identified problem areas include in particular strategy implementation, communication of strategic planning results and monitoring of strategy execution.

One of my major findings is that strategy execution and monitoring of success represent characteristic problem areas in organizational practice. Based on literature review this paper also presents some specific ideas to overcome those barriers.

In order to analyze the topic I employed a three step approach.

  • The first part discusses existing problems and barriers in brief.
  • The second part of the paper summarizes and discusses ideas to overcome these problems and barriers.
  • The third part gives an overview about the benefits of a customized and improved strategic planning process.

Furthermore I would like to argue that in particular progress monitoring and bundling of strategic measure to “strategic campaigns” can help organizations to focus and to improve communication.

The paper was first published in: “Problems and Barriers to Strategic Planning, in: Ekonomika i Organizacja PrzedsiÄ™biorstwa (Economics and Organization of Enterprise), number 3 (696) published by Instytut Organizacji i ZarzÄ…dzania w PrzemyÅ›le “ORGMASZ”, Warsaw (2008). You can read this paper online on this website of our managementportal.

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2 Comments

  1. Pingback: Books and Magazines Blog » Archive » Problems and barriers to strategic planning and proposals for solutions

  2. Strategic Planning is a management tool that helps an organization focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, to assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to a changing environment. In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future.