Logo

Strategic Planning Vs Operational Planning: What’s The Difference?

Download our free Operational Strategy Template Download this template

Looking to learn the difference between strategic and operational planning and how to get better at each? 

You’re in the right place. 

In this guide, you’ll discover the key differences and how to keep up with the immediacy of operational tasks without losing sight of the strategic direction. 

We’ll cover:

  • What Is The Difference Between Strategic Planning And Operational Planning? 

The 4 Key Traits Of An Effective Operational Plan

Strategic and operational plan example.

Free Template Download our free Operational Strategy Template Download this template

What Is The Difference Between Strategic Planning And Operational Planning?

💡Strategic planning sets an organization's long-term direction and goals, considering market trends, business needs, and internal resources. Operational planning breaks down organizational goals into day-to-day activities and short-term objectives. The former establishes the high-level, organization-wide strategy, while the latter manages the roadmap to achieve it.

Let’s dive deeper by taking a closer look at the differences between strategic and operational planning.

strategic planning vs operational planning comparison table

What Is Strategic Planning? 

Strategic planning is the process by which an organization defines its strategy or direction and decides upon the allocation of its resources to pursue this strategy. It includes a high-level approach that shapes the organization's vision and long-term business goals to ensure its growth and position in the market. 

Responsibility for strategic planning rests with top-level management, including CEOs and Boards of Directors. These executives need to consider a variety of external factors—like market trends, economic conditions, and the competitive environment—as well as internal organizational capabilities and resources.

Strategic plan is typically reviewed annually or when major market shifts occur. Its planning time frame generally spans across the next three to five years.

📚Recommended read: Develop An Iterative Strategic Planning Process (+Template)

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning outlines the execution of your strategic plan. It includes specific, short-term actions, projects, and initiatives that contribute to achieving strategic objectives .

annual operating plan diagram

The responsibility for creating these operational plans rests with middle management and department heads. They are tasked with detailing the actions required to achieve the overall objectives and managing the allocation of resources to hit these targets.

Focusing on the immediate, day-to-day business operations, operational plans are generally developed for the current fiscal year and may be broken down further into quarters or monthly objectives.

To maintain alignment with long-term goals, operational plans need regular reviews and updates, ideally on a quarterly or monthly basis. 

📚Recommended read: How To Create An Effective Annual Operating Plan (+Template)

Here are some things you should consider both during and after your operational planning process to succeed in bridging the gap between the business strategy and operations: 

Execution-ready 

An effective operational plan is aligned with the strategic initiatives , but most importantly, it’s executable. To ensure your operational plan's success, increase accountability and focus of your team.

One effective way of doing this is to define one specific owner for every project, KPI, goal, or objective in your plan. That person will be responsible for the timely completion of the item. They might have contributors and a team working to achieve it, but they’ll be the ones responsible for its progress.

👉 How Cascade helps you: 

In Cascade , you can easily assign one (or more owners) to a specific initiative, project, or KPI. You can also add key milestones that should be achieved. This helps you enforce accountability and ensure everyone knows their responsibilities.

Communicated 

Successful execution of an operational plan requires that all team members are fully briefed on their roles and the plan's objectives. It must be documented clearly and shared on accessible platforms for easy reference. 

Regular meetings or messages to check in on progress help keep everyone on the same page. This transparency fosters a collaborative environment where contributions are recognized and roadblocks quickly addressed. 

With Cascade , you can build your operational plans with structure and ease by breaking down complexity into executable outcomes. You can bring in your different teams to speed up the collaboration and source progress updates to observe the execution of your operational plan in real time. 

cascade planner view

The main goal of an operational plan is to make the strategic objectives a reality. Creating a regional or departmental operational plan that doesn’t align with organizational goals costs time and money.

It takes up resources and splits the company’s efforts towards two (or multiple) distinct destinations. Aligning the entire organization with the company’s long-term vision and strategic goals is the toughest challenge large corporations face for one main reason. 

Most tools that most companies use are ineffective. Excel sheets and slides lack the dynamic properties to align actions and metrics with business objectives and goals. Updating these documents and redistributing them inside the organization takes weeks. Companies can’t afford this kind of delay in internal communication.

With Cascade’s Alignment & Relationships , you can visualize how your corporate strategy breaks down into operational and tactical plans. It allows you to directly link crucial business metrics and initiatives. By doing so, you can quickly identify misaligned initiatives and proactively address risks before it’s too late.

Monitored and evaluated 

Success of an operational plan is not guaranteed by the plan itself. What matters is the ongoing diligence in monitoring and evaluating its execution.  

In larger organizations, this approach usually meets four challenges: 

  • Static reporting tools like Excel cannot provide instant insights.
  • Departmental silos impede the free flow of information, essential for a holistic view of operations and real-time evaluations. 
  • Disconnected business software systems complicate the real-time collection and analysis of data.
  • Irregular and unstructured review meetings often miss the mark, concentrating on daily tasks rather than strategic alignment and key performance indicators (KPIs).

All of the above lead to delays and make the information less useful for real-time decision-making.

One way to get better at keeping execution on track is to build better reviewing habits on every organizational level. Run strategy review meetings on a quarterly or monthly basis. This is crucial to see actual results like improved accountability and focused execution . 

To make that habit stick, though, you’ll need to make it frictionless. For example, minimize the time it takes to collect data and build reports. 

👉 How Cascade helps you:  

With Cascade’s integrations , you can consolidate all your business systems and data sources in one place. 

Once you have all data centralized, you can use Reports and Dashboards to get an accurate and real-time picture of your organization’s performance. This will help you to quickly diagnose where you stand today and make fast, confident decisions.

What should an alignment between the overarching strategic plan and operational plans look like in practice? Here’s an example using Cascade’s Alignment Map . This map shows how operational plans are connected to, and support, the company's main objectives and primary focus areas within the strategic plan.

Alignment map in Cascade

Now, let's zoom in and examine a specific operational plan:

operational plan in cascade

In the example above, each strategic focus area contains several objectives. Each of these objectives breaks down into goals, projects, and KPIs. Every goal or project has a defined deadline, each KPI has a target value, and there is a designated owner responsible for achieving it. This granularity is crucial for any effective plan. 

The aim of using a dynamic digital environment for your strategy and operations is twofold: to enable real-time visibility and to decrease the number of tools used in the process.

A static graph showing how departmental plans align, without displaying their progress in real-time, is of little to no use.

What's the benefit of having three projects and their respective KPIs contribute to a higher-level KPI if updates to the children KPIs don't automatically reflect in the parent KPI?

Digitizing your operational plan addresses these inefficient activities by centralizing all information in one place.

Use Cascade To Centralize Your Strategy 🚀

Traditional approach to corporate strategy and planning often falters as it keeps strategy and operations in separate silos, struggling to synchronize them, particularly in larger organizations. Operational plan lags, failing to mirror rapid strategic shifts, and senior management is distanced from the frontline.

How can one expect spreadsheets and presentations to align thousands of employees worldwide? And how can leaders effectively manage business performance without a current snapshot of operations?

This alignment is impossible with static tools. Your strategy and operational plan must exist together in a centralized strategy execution platform like Cascade to bridge that gap.

Want to give it a try? Sign up today for free or book a 1:1 product tour with one of Cascade’s strategy experts.

What is the difference between business planning, strategic planning, and operational planning?

Business planning outlines a company's go-to-market plan, financial projections, market research, and business purpose. Strategic planning is focused on determining the organization's long-term goals and objectives. Operational planning is the process of breaking down the goals and objectives into specific tasks and activities that need to be completed in order to achieve them.

Popular articles

business operational and strategic plan

What Is A Maturity Model? Overview, Examples + Free Assessment

business operational and strategic plan

How To Implement The Balanced Scorecard Framework (With Examples)

business operational and strategic plan

The Best Management Reporting Software For Strategy Officers (2024 Guide)

business operational and strategic plan

How To Set And Execute Strategic Priorities

Your toolkit for strategy success.

business operational and strategic plan

Business Plan Vs Strategic Plan Vs Operational Plan—Differences Explained

Female entrepreneur sitting within a home studio drafting up individual plans for her business.

Noah Parsons

5 min. read

Updated October 27, 2023

Many business owners know and understand the value of a business plan.  The business plan is a key component  of the startup and fundraising process and serves as a foundation for your organization. However, it only tells part of the story. To get the whole picture and have a framework on which to build your business you also need a strategic plan and an operational plan.

  • What is a business plan?

In its simplest format, a  business plan  describes the “who” and the “what” of your business. It lays out who is running the business and what the business does. It describes the products and services that your business sells and who the customers are. 

  • What is a strategic plan?

A  strategic plan  looks beyond the basics of a business plan to explain the “how”. It explains the long-term goals of the business and how it expects to achieve those goals over the long term. A strategic plan explores future products and services that your business might offer and target markets that you might expand into. The plan explains your strategy for long-term growth and expansion.

  • What is an operational plan?

An operation plan zooms into the details of your business to explain how you are going to  achieve your short-term goals . It is the “when” and “where” of your planning process. The operational plan covers the details of marketing campaigns, short-term product development, and more immediate goals and projects that will happen within the next year.

  • What is the difference between a strategic plan and a business plan?

First, let’s look at the difference between a business and a strategic plan. For review:

A  business plan  covers the “who” and “what” of the business. The  strategic plan  gives us long-term goals and explains “how” the business will get there, providing a long-term view.

In broader terms, the business plan tells us who by showing us:

  • Who is running the business? What makes them qualified? What do they bring to the table that adds value?
  • Who is the competition? What do they offer and what makes you different?
  • Who is your customer? How big is the market? Where are they? What do they want and how will you give it to them? Also, how will you connect with your market?

The business plan answers the “what” by telling us:

  • What the business provides and how it’s provided. 
  • Product, services, and operations are all explained so that readers understand how customer needs are met.

The strategic plan, on the other hand, outlines long term goals and the “how”, focusing on the following:

  • Where will the business be in 3, 5, or even 10 years?
  • How will you expand to offer different products and services over time?
  • Will your market and industry change over time and how will your business react to those changes?
  • How will you grow your market and reach new customers?
  • What needs to happen so you can achieve your goals? What resources do you need to get there?
  • How will you measure success? What metrics matter and how will you track them?

So, your business plan explains what you are doing right now. Your strategic plan explains long-term aspirations and how you plan to transition your business from where it is today to where you want it to be in the future. The strategic plan helps you look more deeply into the future and explains the key moves you have to make to achieve your vision.

What’s your biggest business challenge right now?

  • What is the difference between strategic planning and operational planning?

While strategic planning looks at the long term and explains your broad strategies for growth, an operational plan looks at the short term. It explains the details of  what your business is going to do  and when it’s going to do it over the next twelve months or so. An operational plan covers details like:

  • What activities need to happen to achieve your business goals?
  • When will each activity take place, who will do it, and when do you need to reach specific milestones?
  • How will your business operate? What suppliers will you work with? When do you need to have them in place?
  • What marketing campaigns will you run and what will they cost?
  • What investments will you make in your products and services this year?

The bottom line, your operational plan is the short-term action plan for your business. It’s the tasks, milestones, and steps needed to drive your business forward. Typically an operational plan provides details for a 1-year period, while a strategic plan looks at a  3-5 year timeline , and sometimes even longer. The operational plan is essentially the roadmap for how you will execute your strategic plan.

  • How to use your business plan for strategic development and operations

A great business plan can encompass both the basic plans for the business, the long-term strategic plan, and the near-term operational plan. Using a lean planning method, you can tackle all three phases of planning and make the process easy to review and revise as your business grows, changes, and adapts.

Start with a simple plan

The lean planning methodology starts with a simple,  30-minute business plan  that outlines the fundamentals of your business: who you are, what you are doing, and who your customers are. It’s a great way to provide a brief overview of your business.

Expand your plan

From there, you can expand your plan to include your longer-term strategy. Adding greater detail to elements of the plan to explain long-term goals, milestones, and how your products and services will change and expand over time to meet changing market conditions.

Finally, your lean plan will cover  financial forecasts  that include monthly details about the short-term revenue and expenses, as well as longer-term annual summaries of your financial goals, including profitability and potential future loans and investments.

  • Use your business plan to manage your business

Regardless of the type of plan, you are working on, you need a team of players on hand to help you plan, develop, and execute both the operational and strategic plans. Remember, your business needs both to give it a clear foundation and a sense of direction. As well as to assist you with identifying the detailed work that has to happen to help you reach your long-term goals. 

Learn how  LivePlan  can help you develop a business plan that defines your business, outlines strategic steps, and tracks ongoing operations. You can easily share it with your team and all of the right stakeholders, explore scenarios and update your plan based on real-world results. Everything you need to turn your business plan into a tool for growth.

LivePlan Logo

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Content Author: Noah Parsons

Noah is the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan. He started his career at Yahoo! and then helped start the user review site Epinions.com. From there he started a software distribution business in the UK before coming to Palo Alto Software to run the marketing and product teams.

business operational and strategic plan

Table of Contents

Related Articles

business operational and strategic plan

10 Min. Read

Why do you need a business plan?

business operational and strategic plan

When should you write a business plan?

business operational and strategic plan

12 Min. Read

The scientific benefits of business planning

business operational and strategic plan

Start with a business plan outline

The LivePlan Newsletter

Become a smarter, more strategic entrepreneur.

Your first monthly newsetter will be delivered soon..

Unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy .

Garrett's Bike Shop

The quickest way to turn a business idea into a business plan

Fill-in-the-blanks and automatic financials make it easy.

No thanks, I prefer writing 40-page documents.

LivePlan pitch example

Discover the world’s #1 plan building software

business operational and strategic plan

  • Business strategy |
  • 7 strategic planning models, plus 8 fra ...

7 strategic planning models, plus 8 frameworks to help you get started

Team Asana contributor image

Strategic planning is vital in defining where your business is going in the next three to five years. With the right strategic planning models and frameworks, you can uncover opportunities, identify risks, and create a strategic plan to fuel your organization’s success. We list the most popular models and frameworks and explain how you can combine them to create a strategic plan that fits your business.

A strategic plan is a great tool to help you hit your business goals . But sometimes, this tool needs to be updated to reflect new business priorities or changing market conditions. If you decide to use a model that already exists, you can benefit from a roadmap that’s already created. The model you choose can improve your knowledge of what works best in your organization, uncover unknown strengths and weaknesses, or help you find out how you can outpace your competitors.

In this article, we cover the most common strategic planning models and frameworks and explain when to use which one. Plus, get tips on how to apply them and which models and frameworks work well together. 

Strategic planning models vs. frameworks

First off: This is not a one-or-nothing scenario. You can use as many or as few strategic planning models and frameworks as you like. 

When your organization undergoes a strategic planning phase, you should first pick a model or two that you want to apply. This will provide you with a basic outline of the steps to take during the strategic planning process.

[Inline illustration] Strategic planning models vs. frameworks (Infographic)

During that process, think of strategic planning frameworks as the tools in your toolbox. Many models suggest starting with a SWOT analysis or defining your vision and mission statements first. Depending on your goals, though, you may want to apply several different frameworks throughout the strategic planning process.

For example, if you’re applying a scenario-based strategic plan, you could start with a SWOT and PEST(LE) analysis to get a better overview of your current standing. If one of the weaknesses you identify has to do with your manufacturing process, you could apply the theory of constraints to improve bottlenecks and mitigate risks. 

Now that you know the difference between the two, learn more about the seven strategic planning models, as well as the eight most commonly used frameworks that go along with them.

[Inline illustration] The seven strategic planning models (Infographic)

1. Basic model

The basic strategic planning model is ideal for establishing your company’s vision, mission, business objectives, and values. This model helps you outline the specific steps you need to take to reach your goals, monitor progress to keep everyone on target, and address issues as they arise.

If it’s your first strategic planning session, the basic model is the way to go. Later on, you can embellish it with other models to adjust or rewrite your business strategy as needed. Let’s take a look at what kinds of businesses can benefit from this strategic planning model and how to apply it.

Small businesses or organizations

Companies with little to no strategic planning experience

Organizations with few resources 

Write your mission statement. Gather your planning team and have a brainstorming session. The more ideas you can collect early in this step, the more fun and rewarding the analysis phase will feel.

Identify your organization’s goals . Setting clear business goals will increase your team’s performance and positively impact their motivation.

Outline strategies that will help you reach your goals. Ask yourself what steps you have to take in order to reach these goals and break them down into long-term, mid-term, and short-term goals .

Create action plans to implement each of the strategies above. Action plans will keep teams motivated and your organization on target.

Monitor and revise the plan as you go . As with any strategic plan, it’s important to closely monitor if your company is implementing it successfully and how you can adjust it for a better outcome.

2. Issue-based model

Also called goal-based planning model, this is essentially an extension of the basic strategic planning model. It’s a bit more dynamic and very popular for companies that want to create a more comprehensive plan.

Organizations with basic strategic planning experience

Businesses that are looking for a more comprehensive plan

Conduct a SWOT analysis . Assess your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with a SWOT analysis to get a better overview of what your strategic plan should focus on. We’ll give into how to conduct a SWOT analysis when we get into the strategic planning frameworks below.

Identify and prioritize major issues and/or goals. Based on your SWOT analysis, identify and prioritize what your strategic plan should focus on this time around.

Develop your main strategies that address these issues and/or goals. Aim to develop one overarching strategy that addresses your highest-priority goal and/or issue to keep this process as simple as possible.

Update or create a mission and vision statement . Make sure that your business’s statements align with your new or updated strategy. If you haven’t already, this is also a chance for you to define your organization’s values.

Create action plans. These will help you address your organization’s goals, resource needs, roles, and responsibilities. 

Develop a yearly operational plan document. This model works best if your business repeats the strategic plan implementation process on an annual basis, so use a yearly operational plan to capture your goals, progress, and opportunities for next time.

Allocate resources for your year-one operational plan. Whether you need funding or dedicated team members to implement your first strategic plan, now is the time to allocate all the resources you’ll need.

Monitor and revise the strategic plan. Record your lessons learned in the operational plan so you can revisit and improve it for the next strategic planning phase.

The issue-based plan can repeat on an annual basis (or less often once you resolve the issues). It’s important to update the plan every time it’s in action to ensure it’s still doing the best it can for your organization.

You don’t have to repeat the full process every year—rather, focus on what’s a priority during this run.

3. Alignment model

This model is also called strategic alignment model (SAM) and is one of the most popular strategic planning models. It helps you align your business and IT strategies with your organization’s strategic goals. 

You’ll have to consider four equally important, yet different perspectives when applying the alignment strategic planning model:

Strategy execution: The business strategy driving the model

Technology potential: The IT strategy supporting the business strategy

Competitive potential: Emerging IT capabilities that can create new products and services

Service level: Team members dedicated to creating the best IT system in the organization

Ideally, your strategy will check off all the criteria above—however, it’s more likely you’ll have to find a compromise. 

Here’s how to create a strategic plan using the alignment model and what kinds of companies can benefit from it.

Organizations that need to fine-tune their strategies

Businesses that want to uncover issues that prevent them from aligning with their mission

Companies that want to reassess objectives or correct problem areas that prevent them from growing

Outline your organization’s mission, programs, resources, and where support is needed. Before you can improve your statements and approaches, you need to define what exactly they are.

Identify what internal processes are working and which ones aren’t. Pinpoint which processes are causing problems, creating bottlenecks , or could otherwise use improving. Then prioritize which internal processes will have the biggest positive impact on your business.

Identify solutions. Work with the respective teams when you’re creating a new strategy to benefit from their experience and perspective on the current situation.

Update your strategic plan with the solutions. Update your strategic plan and monitor if implementing it is setting your business up for improvement or growth. If not, you may have to return to the drawing board and update your strategic plan with new solutions.

4. Scenario model

The scenario model works great if you combine it with other models like the basic or issue-based model. This model is particularly helpful if you need to consider external factors as well. These can be government regulations, technical, or demographic changes that may impact your business.

Organizations trying to identify strategic issues and goals caused by external factors

Identify external factors that influence your organization. For example, you should consider demographic, regulation, or environmental factors.

Review the worst case scenario the above factors could have on your organization. If you know what the worst case scenario for your business looks like, it’ll be much easier to prepare for it. Besides, it’ll take some of the pressure and surprise out of the mix, should a scenario similar to the one you create actually occur.

Identify and discuss two additional hypothetical organizational scenarios. On top of your worst case scenario, you’ll also want to define the best case and average case scenarios. Keep in mind that the worst case scenario from the previous step can often provoke strong motivation to change your organization for the better. However, discussing the other two will allow you to focus on the positive—the opportunities your business may have ahead.

Identify and suggest potential strategies or solutions. Everyone on the team should now brainstorm different ways your business could potentially respond to each of the three scenarios. Discuss the proposed strategies as a team afterward.

Uncover common considerations or strategies for your organization. There’s a good chance that your teammates come up with similar solutions. Decide which ones you like best as a team or create a new one together.

Identify the most likely scenario and the most reasonable strategy. Finally, examine which of the three scenarios is most likely to occur in the next three to five years and how your business should respond to potential changes.

5. Self-organizing model

Also called the organic planning model, the self-organizing model is a bit different from the linear approaches of the other models. You’ll have to be very patient with this method. 

This strategic planning model is all about focusing on the learning and growing process rather than achieving a specific goal. Since the organic model concentrates on continuous improvement , the process is never really over.

Large organizations that can afford to take their time

Businesses that prefer a more naturalistic, organic planning approach that revolves around common values, communication, and shared reflection

Companies that have a clear understanding of their vision

Define and communicate your organization’s cultural values . Your team can only think clearly and with solutions in mind when they have a clear understanding of your organization's values.

Communicate the planning group’s vision for the organization. Define and communicate the vision with everyone involved in the strategic planning process. This will align everyone’s ideas with your company’s vision.

Discuss what processes will help realize the organization’s vision on a regular basis. Meet every quarter to discuss strategies or tactics that will move your organization closer to realizing your vision.

6. Real-time model

This fluid model can help organizations that deal with rapid changes to their work environment. There are three levels of success in the real-time model: 

Organizational: At the organizational level, you’re forming strategies in response to opportunities or trends.

Programmatic: At the programmatic level, you have to decide how to respond to specific outcomes or environmental changes.

Operational: On the operational level, you will study internal systems, policies, and people to develop a strategy for your company.

Figuring out your competitive advantage can be difficult, but this is absolutely crucial to ensure success. Whether it’s a unique asset or strength your organization has or an outstanding execution of services or programs—it’s important that you can set yourself apart from others in the industry to succeed.

Companies that need to react quickly to changing environments

Businesses that are seeking new tools to help them align with their organizational strategy

Define your mission and vision statement. If you ever feel stuck formulating your company’s mission or vision statement, take a look at those of others. Maybe Asana’s vision statement sparks some inspiration.

Research, understand, and learn from competitor strategy and market trends. Pick a handful of competitors in your industry and find out how they’ve created success for themselves. How did they handle setbacks or challenges? What kinds of challenges did they even encounter? Are these common scenarios in the market? Learn from your competitors by finding out as much as you can about them.

Study external environments. At this point, you can combine the real-time model with the scenario model to find solutions to threats and opportunities outside of your control.

Conduct a SWOT analysis of your internal processes, systems, and resources. Besides the external factors your team has to consider, it’s also important to look at your company’s internal environment and how well you’re prepared for different scenarios.

Develop a strategy. Discuss the results of your SWOT analysis to develop a business strategy that builds toward organizational, programmatic, and operational success.

Rinse and repeat. Monitor how well the new strategy is working for your organization and repeat the planning process as needed to ensure you’re on top or, perhaps, ahead of the game. 

7. Inspirational model

This last strategic planning model is perfect to inspire and energize your team as they work toward your organization’s goals. It’s also a great way to introduce or reconnect your employees to your business strategy after a merger or acquisition.

Businesses with a dynamic and inspired start-up culture

Organizations looking for inspiration to reinvigorate the creative process

Companies looking for quick solutions and strategy shifts

Gather your team to discuss an inspirational vision for your organization. The more people you can gather for this process, the more input you will receive.

Brainstorm big, hairy audacious goals and ideas. Encouraging your team not to hold back with ideas that may seem ridiculous will do two things: for one, it will mitigate the fear of contributing bad ideas. But more importantly, it may lead to a genius idea or suggestion that your team wouldn’t have thought of if they felt like they had to think inside of the box.

Assess your organization’s resources. Find out if your company has the resources to implement your new ideas. If they don’t, you’ll have to either adjust your strategy or allocate more resources.

Develop a strategy balancing your resources and brainstorming ideas. Far-fetched ideas can grow into amazing opportunities but they can also bear great risk. Make sure to balance ideas with your strategic direction. 

Now, let’s dive into the most commonly used strategic frameworks.

8. SWOT analysis framework

One of the most popular strategic planning frameworks is the SWOT analysis . A SWOT analysis is a great first step in identifying areas of opportunity and risk—which can help you create a strategic plan that accounts for growth and prepares for threats.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Here’s an example:

[Inline illustration] SWOT analysis (Example)

9. OKRs framework

A big part of strategic planning is setting goals for your company. That’s where OKRs come into play. 

OKRs stand for objective and key results—this goal-setting framework helps your organization set and achieve goals. It provides a somewhat holistic approach that you can use to connect your team’s work to your organization’s big-picture goals.  When team members understand how their individual work contributes to the organization’s success, they tend to be more motivated and produce better results

10. Balanced scorecard (BSC) framework

The balanced scorecard is a popular strategic framework for businesses that want to take a more holistic approach rather than just focus on their financial performance. It was designed by David Norton and Robert Kaplan in the 1990s, it’s used by companies around the globe to: 

Communicate goals

Align their team’s daily work with their company’s strategy

Prioritize products, services, and projects

Monitor their progress toward their strategic goals

Your balanced scorecard will outline four main business perspectives:

Customers or clients , meaning their value, satisfaction, and/or retention

Financial , meaning your effectiveness in using resources and your financial performance

Internal process , meaning your business’s quality and efficiency

Organizational capacity , meaning your organizational culture, infrastructure and technology, and human resources

With the help of a strategy map, you can visualize and communicate how your company is creating value. A strategy map is a simple graphic that shows cause-and-effect connections between strategic objectives. 

The balanced scorecard framework is an amazing tool to use from outlining your mission, vision, and values all the way to implementing your strategic plan .

You can use an integration like Lucidchart to create strategy maps for your business in Asana.

11. Porter’s Five Forces framework

If you’re using the real-time strategic planning model, Porter’s Five Forces are a great framework to apply. You can use it to find out what your product’s or service’s competitive advantage is before entering the market.

Developed by Michael E. Porter , the framework outlines five forces you have to be aware of and monitor:

[Inline illustration] Porter’s Five Forces framework (Infographic)

Threat of new industry entrants: Any new entry into the market results in increased pressure on prices and costs. 

Competition in the industry: The more competitors that exist, the more difficult it will be for you to create value in the market with your product or service.

Bargaining power of suppliers: Suppliers can wield more power if there are less alternatives for buyers or it’s expensive, time consuming, or difficult to switch to a different supplier.

Bargaining power of buyers: Buyers can wield more power if the same product or service is available elsewhere with little to no difference in quality.

Threat of substitutes: If another company already covers the market’s needs, you’ll have to create a better product or service or make it available for a lower price at the same quality in order to compete.

Remember, industry structures aren’t static. The more dynamic your strategic plan is, the better you’ll be able to compete in a market.

12. VRIO framework

The VRIO framework is another strategic planning tool designed to help you evaluate your competitive advantage. VRIO stands for value, rarity, imitability, and organization.

It’s a resource-based theory developed by Jay Barney. With this framework, you can study your firmed resources and find out whether or not your company can transform them into sustained competitive advantages. 

Firmed resources can be tangible (e.g., cash, tools, inventory, etc.) or intangible (e.g., copyrights, trademarks, organizational culture, etc.). Whether these resources will actually help your business once you enter the market depends on four qualities:

Valuable : Will this resource either increase your revenue or decrease your costs and thereby create value for your business?

Rare : Are the resources you’re using rare or can others use your resources as well and therefore easily provide the same product or service?

Inimitable : Are your resources either inimitable or non-substitutable? In other words, how unique and complex are your resources?

Organizational: Are you organized enough to use your resources in a way that captures their value, rarity, and inimitability?

It’s important that your resources check all the boxes above so you can ensure that you have sustained competitive advantage over others in the industry.

13. Theory of Constraints (TOC) framework

If the reason you’re currently in a strategic planning process is because you’re trying to mitigate risks or uncover issues that could hurt your business—this framework should be in your toolkit.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a problem-solving framework that can help you identify limiting factors or bottlenecks preventing your organization from hitting OKRs or KPIs . 

Whether it’s a policy, market, or recourse constraint—you can apply the theory of constraints to solve potential problems, respond to issues, and empower your team to improve their work with the resources they have.

14. PEST/PESTLE analysis framework

The idea of the PEST analysis is similar to that of the SWOT analysis except that you’re focusing on external factors and solutions. It’s a great framework to combine with the scenario-based strategic planning model as it helps you define external factors connected to your business’s success.

PEST stands for political, economic, sociological, and technological factors. Depending on your business model, you may want to expand this framework to include legal and environmental factors as well (PESTLE). These are the most common factors you can include in a PESTLE analysis:

Political: Taxes, trade tariffs, conflicts

Economic: Interest and inflation rate, economic growth patterns, unemployment rate

Social: Demographics, education, media, health

Technological: Communication, information technology, research and development, patents

Legal: Regulatory bodies, environmental regulations, consumer protection

Environmental: Climate, geographical location, environmental offsets

15. Hoshin Kanri framework

Hoshin Kanri is a great tool to communicate and implement strategic goals. It’s a planning system that involves the entire organization in the strategic planning process. The term is Japanese and stands for “compass management” and is also known as policy management. 

This strategic planning framework is a top-down approach that starts with your leadership team defining long-term goals which are then aligned and communicated with every team member in the company. 

You should hold regular meetings to monitor progress and update the timeline to ensure that every teammate’s contributions are aligned with the overarching company goals.

Stick to your strategic goals

Whether you’re a small business just starting out or a nonprofit organization with decades of experience, strategic planning is a crucial step in your journey to success. 

If you’re looking for a tool that can help you and your team define, organize, and implement your strategic goals, Asana is here to help. Our goal-setting software allows you to connect all of your team members in one place, visualize progress, and stay on target.

Related resources

business operational and strategic plan

Business impact analysis: 4 steps to prepare for anything

business operational and strategic plan

The beginner’s guide to business process management (BPM)

business operational and strategic plan

Project portfolio management 101

business operational and strategic plan

Marketing campaign management: 7 steps for success

strategic vs operational planning

Strategic vs operational planning: How to determine and execute on your vision

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 7 min

Strategic and operational plans go together—but for many companies, these terms seem interchangeable at first glance. The distinction is important because both of these plans are truly essential aspects of planning inside organizations. Without the big picture and the tactical details, you simply don’t have a plan at all. 

What strategic plans and operational plans do within your organization makes a difference in reaching goals within your team, department, and company as a whole. 

What is a strategic plan? 

Strategic plans take a high-level approach to a company’s vision and apply it to the external environment to identify the right priorities. Your strategic plan helps you develop goals and coordinate internal resources accordingly to achieve those goals, generally over a specific time frame.

Within a strategic plan, you’ll typically find: 

  • Specific goals: Goals created from the mission and vision, directing organizational focus. 
  • Stakeholder perspectives: Input from people throughout your organization, bringing helpful and insightful viewpoints that shape the plan and content. 
  • Future projections: Overview of various scenarios you anticipate for the future and how the organization could respond. 
  • SWOT analysis: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that your organization faces. 

For example, a strategic plan may observe a threat such as a new competitor entering your market—in response to the increased competition, your plan says your organization will revise your current pricing strategy. 

business operational and strategic plan

Learn how remote work has changed the way companies approach strategic planning—and why that's the better approach for the long haul.

What is an operational plan?

You can think of an operational plan as a “work plan” since it specifically directs work activities in your organization. Instead of working from projections and guesses about the future, your operational plan works within the present and serves to translate ideas from your strategic plan into action. 

Here’s what you’ll likely find inside an operational plan: 

  • Implementation tactics: With the strategic plan’s goals in view, the operational plan has more concrete goals along with specific approaches to implement operational goals. 
  • Short-term emphasis: Instead of looking far forward, operational plans highlight what your organization can do today. Operational plans are written frequently to stay relevant. 
  • Detailed action items: Operational plans might have hundreds of items in them. 

For instance, an operational plan may explain how your organization will create and implement a new pricing strategy, such as appointing a department and a champion to lead the change and assigning deadlines for specific tasks to manage the transition. 

Key differences between strategic and operational plans

Many people believe they have a strategic plan when they are actually creating an operational plan and vice versa. 

Essentially, the biggest distinction is in application. Strategic plans stay big-picture, and operational plans are specifically focused on implementation. As such, there are significant differences in how strategic and operational plans are designed:

  • Specificity: Strategic plans must stay relatively vague, but operational plans can be highly specific. Your operational plan is written for a department within your organization.
  • Time: In contrast to strategic plans, operational plans are very tactical and short term in nature.
  • Budgetary focus: With operational plans, short-term, department-level budgets are considered. Strategic plans involve budgets for the entire company. 
  • Authorship and reporting: Generally, your senior management writes your strategic plan, and individual departments write their own operational plans with input from leadership. Similarly, senior management will ensure that the company is on track to meet strategic planning goals while departments will do the same for their operational plans. 

As you can see, strategic plans and operational plans have significant differences in form, function, and creation. Both are important and allow your organization to stay focused on valuable goals for the company.

When to use strategic vs operational plans

Because strategic and operational plans work well together, creating both for your organization is usually ideal. Your strategic plan guides the creation of your operational plan, so consider starting with a strategic plan first and moving on to operational plans for different departments. Your operational plan allows you to execute on your strategic plan. Develop operational plans once you’ve used the strategic plan to determine where your organization is headed. 

Why a strategic plan isn’t enough 

If you’re tempted to stop with a strategic plan, keep in mind that it’s possible you’ll create a strategic plan that masquerades as an operational plan or that becomes a merged strategic and operational plan. Strategies are only effective if they’re implemented, and any tactics you develop for your strategic plan will just become an operational plan by another name. 

Or, worse, you could create a strategic plan and then create lists of implementation tactics without going through a systematic process of planning these operational approaches. 

This is risky for the following reasons:

  • Implementation uncertainty: With only a strategic plan, teams and individuals don’t know what to do. 
  • Misallocated resources: Time and other resources are easier to waste without tactics that are well thought out. 
  • Risk of conflict: Leaving strategic goals open to interpretation without an operational plan can introduce unnecessary conflict. Everyone could implement the strategic plan as they see fit, without sticking to guidance from an operational plan.
  • No road testing: In a sense, your operational plan also serves as a feedback mechanism for your strategic plan. A bad strategic plan will lead to problems at the operations level during implementation, giving your organization a chance to revisit the strategic plan if necessary. 

That strategic plan has value, even if you prefer to think about implementation tactics instead of a big-picture view. The questions you answer while developing your strategic plan enable you to create a strong operational plan.

Why operational plans aren’t enough either 

Similarly, your operational plan needs a strategic plan for guidance. Tactics should be directed towards specific goals that serve broader goals within your organization. 

With only operational plans, you may:

  • Win battles and lose wars: Tactics can work successfully and advance business goals, but without a compass, you may miss out on long-term steps your business needs. Strategic plans ensure your activities do lead somewhere beyond short-term planning. 
  • Collect KPIs without applying them: Metrics are important, but strategic planning helps to provide context that’s sorely needed to make sense of this data. 
  • Miss out on cumulative progress: Over the course of five years, your organization can be in a very different place. Think of how competitive pressures, your industry environment, and other influences can shape your business over time. 

For these reasons, an operational plan that can support your strategic plan is essential for any business. 

How to begin strategic planning

Given the value to your organization that these plans provide, you should seriously consider creating both types of plans and keeping them updated. Beginning with the strategic plan, these steps can guide you along the process: 

1. Involve stakeholders: Strategic plan creation is generally an activity for your senior leadership. Have them kick off the plan and gather input, as appropriate, from the rest of the organization to help with identifying the right strategic priorities.

2. Create a SWOT analysis: Exploring your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help you determine what should go inside your strategic plan. 

SWOT analysis

3. Develop your goals: By looking at your organization’s mission and vision, determine goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. 

4. Determine your KPIs: Know how to measure your progress as an organization towards goals in your strategic plan.

5. Document your plan: Write down your strategic plan and decide how often you’ll revisit it. 

6. Share with your organization: Be sure to share the strategic plan, as appropriate, with departments to help them develop their operational plans. 

After this process, individual teams can begin to create operational plans based on the strategy that’s been laid out. Each team or department should have its own operational tactics so they can stay on target. 

Strategic and operational plans are better together 

Using strategic planning and operational planning, you can keep your entire organization on track. Success as a business doesn’t happen by accident. The right plans allow you to measure your progress, set goals, and make important changes when necessary, helping your company stay competitive.

Take the first step by strategy mapping. We even have a Lucidchart template ready for you.

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

Bring your bright ideas to life.

or continue with

Operational Planning

Operational planning definition.

What does operational planning mean? Operational planning creates a detailed roadmap based on a strategic plan. The operational plan aligns timelines, action items and key milestones that finance or the business needs to complete to execute on the strategic plan. In this way, an operational plan outlines the organization’s key objectives and goals and clarifies how the organization will achieve them.

During the operational planning process, finance or the business responsibilities are described in detail based on the timeline for the operational plan. The timeframe should depend on typical organizational velocity; creating an annual operational plan is a fluid, changing process, so keeping clarity and collaboration is vital for success.

A well-conceived business operational plan keeps team members collaborating smoothly, ensures everyone knows what needs to be done and what their part in it is, and guides critical decisions about long-term strategy.

Key steps of operational planning

  • Define the goal or vision for the operational plan clearly
  • Analyze and identify key business stakeholders, resources and budgets team members, budgets, and resources
  • Consistently track and inform team members and stakeholders on progress
  • Adapt the operational plan to wider company goals as needed

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning faqs.

What is operational planning for finance or the business? Operational planning is the result of a team or department working to execute a strategic plan. It is a future-oriented process that maps out department goals, capabilities, and budgets to promote the success of team-based activities designed to support the strategic plan.

Operational business plans are most effective when there is buy-in from the entire team or department, ensuring issues are reported, goals identified and timelines get delivered,, and business collaboration is more effective. When communication across finance and the business exists, operational plans work even more efficiently to ensure that the entire organization reaches its goals.

An example of operational planning would be a manufacturer creating a plan to increase revenue by 30%. Finance partners with sales, the marketing team, operations and other key business areas to align on the strategies needed to support revenue growth and achieve business goals together. Another operational planning example might be a brand looking to introduce a new product. It would need to leverage and expand existing capabilities, harness new tools, and create a roadmap for doing so.

Other operational planning examples in management include mapping business or production output to meet other new goals, planning for new or expanded solutions, sales and operational planning, providing a roadmap or increased clarity surrounding business goals, or creating a strategy for increased business partnership.

Strategic Planning vs Operational Planning

There is a difference between strategic planning, tactical planning, and operational planning. However, strategic, tactical, and operational planning need to be considered together and build upon one another.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan describes the high-level goals, long-term vision, and organizational mission, usually over the next three to five years. It also details the major projects or initiatives that will happen to meet them, and how the organization will measure the goals, broadly. This is a big picture view of goals, but it can’t really show a team how to achieve those goals step-by-step.

What is an operational plan ?

An operational plan (also known as an operations plan, work plan, or operation plan) is a detailed outline of what a team or department will focus on in the immediate future—typically within the upcoming year. The operational plan answers questions about things like weekly goals and tasks, such as what they are generally, what they will achieve, who will do them, and how often.

What is a tactical plan?

Tactical planning is a step organizations or teams sometimes take after they create strategic and operational plans. The idea is to break the plans into smaller goals and objectives, to define them and determine which steps and actions will be most effective in achieving them. In other words, the operational plan may just have set a goal or task for person A about goal 1, but a tactical plan might set forth the detailed steps person A will need to execute every week.

Tactical planning and operational planning differ in the kinds of questions they ask. Operational plans ask how the team should do something so they can both adhere more broadly to the organizational mission and specific strategic goals. Tactical plans ask specific questions about how to accomplish strategic and operational goals. They are the most microscopic version of planning.

In summary, a strategic plan is a business-level, long-term strategy plan over the next three to five years. It is a visionary plan, the big picture. Its focus is not on implementation. An operational plan is smaller in timeline and both scope, and the goal of operational planning is both to describe a more granular view of how to achieve strategic goals and to focus on implementation in the form of weekly actions, specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), etc. A tactical plan is the narrowest view that is focused on implementation only, and things like daily tasks for one person or a small team and smaller goals.

Strategic and operational planning work together; operational planning is an important part of a whole strategy. Tactical planning helps teams achieve their strategic and operational planning goals.

The goal of an operational plan is to give particular tasks to specific departments, not the company as a whole, whereas it is strategic vs operational planning that sets forth long-term goals for the next three to five years.

What is the Operational Planning Process?

Going through the operational planning cycle, keep these best practices and operational planning techniques in mind.

Research and Identify Goals

The goal of an operational plan and its creation process should be to address some foundational questions:

  • Start with the strategic plan: how will it shape the actions we take?
  • What is the budget? How will it compare to previous years?
  • What is the current status, considering budget, resources, and team members? What is the goal status in one, two, three years, etc.?
  • How can the team practically achieve the goal? What operational planning methodology informs the approach? What are the operational planning tools we will use?
  • What benchmarks should be used to assess our progress? They might include 5-star reviews, customer service cases closed, launch deadlines met, number of goods manufactured, new customers acquired, revenue increases, etc.

Ask team members the questions, and prioritize responses based on how difficult they are to execute, and how critical.

Visualize the Operational Plan

Make sure the vision for the plan is clearly articulated. Clearly defined goals, charts and visualizations, and project management software can help offer a high-level view of tasks and progress for all stakeholders. Identify which operational business planning techniques and tools will work best for achieving the organization’s goals.

Assign People and Budget

The budgeting process in operational planning consists of assigning tasks and allocating resources and budget for team members to complete them. Each piece of the budget should map out to a financial goal in the operational plan with corresponding timetables and deliverables.

Tracking and Informing Progress

Build out a reporting process that corresponds to the clear objectives with goals, targets, deliverables, resource allocation, and timetables in the operational plan. This way the stakeholders can report progress as the plan moves forward.

Adjust the Operational Plan as Needed

A well-conceived operational plan should allow you to understand precisely which activities and aspects of the plan failed to perform. This in turn allows the team to pivot, involve new team members as needed, and continue to the next benchmark with a refined operational plan.

Consider the Right Indicators

Use key performance metrics or indicators that are predictive, not just lagging indicators. You need some lagging indicators such as past sales or attendance figures, but leading indicators such as market trends should also contribute to both reporting progress and adjusting the operational plan.

What Should Operational Planning Include?

Approaches to operational planning vary, but each team has as its main objective producing a functional operational plan that reflects a practical approach to the organization’s mission and strategic plan.

What should an operational plan include? This strategic document should plan all of the daily processes and operations that a business and its teams or departments including marketing, recruitment, and finance need to do to achieve company goals.

A well-defined operational plan should ensure that each manager and employee understands what their specific responsibilities are, and how and when to execute them.

The operation plan itself should have several components:

  • A title page. This summarizes the operational plan.
  • An executive summary. This provides a few sentences with a rough idea of the overall plan and its basic sections.
  • Mission and objectives. This section defines the organization’s broader mission and objectives. It also describes goals and milestones for the coming year that relate to the operational plan.
  • KPIs. Evaluate metrics and KPIs that will measure results.
  • Financial summary. This offers an overview and a financial breakdown of all projects included in the operational plan to demonstrate there is sufficient capital to execute the plan.
  • Hiring plan. Determine how many monthly/quarterly team members to hire across different departments.
  • Key assumptions and risks. Provide this risk analysis so mitigation can be performed.
  • Next steps. Suggest next steps, if any.

What are the Steps in Operational Planning?

The purpose of the operational planning process is not to generate new goals or plans, but to create an operational plan in support of existing strategic goals:

Start with a strategic plan

Create the strategic plan first. Before considering immediate tasks and day-to-day details, it’s important to see the long-term vision and goals. As the leadership team creates the strategic plan, they determine the position of the organization and develop its strategy. They should also monitor the strategic plan, and adjust it as needed.

Sharpen the scope

Narrow the scope of the operational plan to a department, team, or focus area to ensure it is detail-oriented and targeted. The size of the organization determines the scope of your operational plan. In other words, you start big with the strategic plan, and then narrow down to the operational plan and the focus area of the team who will execute it—and then create various supporting action plans for execution.

Identify key stakeholders

Identify stakeholders in the operational planning process before creating an operational plan. The team members who create the operational plan should lead and inform others around the operational plan, so you’ll need to know who they are before execution.

Create the operational plan

Your operational plan sets forth the timeframe, the goals to achieve, and explains the actions the team will take to achieve those goals on time. It must include objectives, deliverables, quality standards (if any), desired outcomes, operating budget, staffing and resource requirements, and progress and monitoring information.

For example:

An organization’s strategic plan sets forth the goal of the marketing team increasing brand awareness by at least 10% in the next year. This will mean increased engagement with potential customers and more eyes on new marketing materials.

This will require support from the design team, who will have new goals: update the website and create new promotional materials. To achieve those goals, they will collaborate with the development team on the update and hire social media engagement team members. The team will use software and management tools to report and track their progress.

Share the operational plan

Share the operational plan with key stakeholders so they understand mission critical goals and the daily tasks that support them. Track progress in real-time for best results. This also allows you to update the operational plan and report on progress as needed to team members and stakeholders. Like project planning, operational planning is never a one-and-done task, but remains a continuous process.

Why is Operational Planning Important?

At the organizational level, project success demands a strong operational plan. Chaos and confusion often reign without an operational plan, as budgets rise and team members lose sight of tasks and deadlines.

The importance of operational planning is in the creation of a single source of truth that enables comprehensive understanding of mission, strategic goals, and how to achieve them. An operational plan helps teams identify areas that cause lack of clarity, missed revenue generation opportunities, inefficient strategies, or areas of reduced business partnership.

What are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

The advantages of operational planning can impact organizations of any size. An operational plan helps teams reach strategic goals by connecting teams and their individual tasks to company goals. A detail-oriented operational plan has many benefits.

It clarifies organizational goals. Operational planning helps leadership define responsibilities, daily tasks, and activities in detail. It also sets out how individual team members support overall department and organizational goals and defines outcomes for them to measure daily tasks against.

It also boosts team productivity. Operational planning enhances efficiency, productivity, and profits by ensuring employees in each department and across the company know their daily responsibilities and objectives.

Operational planning disadvantages include creating an operational plan based on human error, or whose success is overly dependent upon effective coordination of diverse cross-functional teams. Singular focus only on coordination and not connecting the business is a primary disadvantage of implementing an operations planning process.

Who is Responsible for Operational Planning?

Create an operational plan at the department or team level to best precisely capture the roles and tasks. At a larger organization, an operational plan might even be specific to a particular initiative—much like a detailed tactical or work plan.

There several considerations that determine who creates operational plans:

  • Scope. For every activity, the operational plan includes the who, what, and when and must be laser-focused on the initiative itself and the team. Watch to ensure scope is not too broad.
  • Timeline. An operational plan should cover a quarter, six months, or a fiscal year, depending on organizational speed and velocity.
  • Stakeholders. To accurately predict what work to include in the plan, ensure operational planning stakeholders stay close to the work. Finance must unit the business from tactical details to strategic execution.

Typically, the operational plan is the realm of middle-management, in contrast to the top-down execution style from the C-suite the strategic plan receives. Its scope is also narrower and as routine tasks are mapped out, which continuously evolves Changes to the strategic plan will be less frequent.

Given the focus on day-to-day activities, allocation of resources, and tasks, middle-managers are often best-suited to map out and implement the operational plan.

Does Planful Help With Operational Planning?

Yes. Planful’s financial performance platform unites the demand for structured planning originating in finance with the business need for dynamic planning. Planful empowers organizations to make smarter decisions more confidently, rapidly, and strategically and ensures the data collection process for operational planning isn’t a time-consuming, manual process.

Use Planful to build collaborative financial plans that align resources with strategic objectives. Adjust and pivot as business conditions change, model hundreds of different scenarios reliably, and turn annual plans into quarterly or monthly rolling forecasts, all based on what the organization needs now.

Find out more about Planful’s Operational Planning solution here.

Get Started with Planful

  • Contact sales

Start free trial

Operational Planning: How to Make an Operations Plan

ProjectManager

The operations of your business can be defined as the sum of all the daily activities that you and your team execute to create products or services and engage with your customers, among other critical business functions. While organizing these moving parts might sound difficult, it can be easily done by writing a business operational plan. But before we learn how to make one, let’s first understand what’s the relationship between strategic and operational planning.

Operational Planning vs. Strategic Planning

Operational planning and strategic planning are complementary to each other. This is because strategic plans define the business strategy and the long-term goals for your organization, while operational plans define the steps required to achieve them.

What Is a Strategic Plan?

A strategic plan is a business document that describes the business goals of a company as well as the high-level actions that will be taken to achieve them over a time period of 1-3 years.

What Is an Operational Plan?

Operational plans map the daily, weekly or monthly business operations that’ll be executed by the department to complete the goals you’ve previously defined in your strategic plan. Operational plans go deeper into explaining your business operations as they explain roles and responsibilities, timelines and the scope of work.

Operational plans work best when an entire department buys in, assigning due dates for tasks, measuring goals for success, reporting on issues and collaborating effectively. They work even better when there’s a platform like ProjectManager , which facilitates communication across departments to ensure that the machine is running smoothly as each team reaches its benchmark. Get started with ProjectManager for free today.

Gantt chart with operational plan

What Is Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of turning strategic plans into action plans, which simply means breaking down high-level strategic goals and activities into smaller, actionable steps. The main goal of operational planning is to coordinate different departments and layers of management to ensure the whole organization works towards the same objective, which is achieving the goals set forth in the strategic plan .

How to Make an Operational Plan

There’s no single approach to follow when making an operation plan for your business. However, there’s one golden rule in operations management : your strategic and operational plans must be aligned. Based on that principle, here are seven steps to make an operational plan.

  • Map business processes and workflows: What steps need to be taken at the operations level to accomplish long-term strategic goals?
  • Set operational-level goals: Describe what operational-level goals contribute to the achievement of larger strategic goals.
  • Determine the operational timeline: Is there any time frame for the achievement of the operational plan?
  • Define your resource requirements: Estimate what resources are needed for the execution of the operational plan.
  • Estimate the operational budget: Based on your resource requirements, estimate costs and define an operational budget.
  • Set a hiring plan: Are there any skills gaps that need to be filled in your organization?
  • Set key performance indicators: Define metrics and performance tracking procedures to measure your team’s performance.

business operational and strategic plan

Get your free

Operational Plan Template

Use this free Operational Plan Template for Word to manage your projects better.

What Should be Included in an Operational Plan?

Your operational plan should describe your business operations as accurately as possible so that internal teams know how the company works and how they can help achieve the larger strategic objectives. Here’s a list of some of the key elements that you’ll need to consider when writing an operational plan.

Executive Summary

An executive summary is a brief document that summarizes the content of larger documents like business plans, strategic plans or operation plans. Their main purpose is to provide a quick overview for busy stakeholders.

Operational Budget

An operational budget is an estimation of the expected operating costs and revenues for a given time period. As with other types of budget, the operational budget defines the amount of money that’s available to acquire raw materials, equipment or anything else that’s needed for business operations.

It’s important to limit your spending to stay below your operational budget, otherwise, your company could run out of resources to execute its normal activities. You can use our free operating budget template for Excel to track your operating costs.

Operational Objectives

It’s essential to align your operational objectives with your strategic objectives. For example, if one of your strategic objectives is to increase sales by 25 percent over the next three years, one possible operational objective would be to hire new sales employees. You should always grab your strategic plan objectives and turn them into one or multiple action items .

Processes & Workflows

Explain the various business processes, workflows and tasks that need to be executed to achieve your operational objectives. Make sure to explain what resources are needed, such as raw materials, equipment or human resources.

Operational Timeline

It’s important to establish a timeline for your operational plan. In most cases, your operational plan will have the same length as your strategic plan, but in some scenarios, you might create multiple operational plans for specific purposes. Not all operational plans are equal, so the length of your operational timeline will depend on the duration of your projects , workflows and processes.

Hiring Plan

Find any skills gap there might be in your team. You might need to hire a couple of individuals or even create new departments in order to execute your business processes .

Quality Assurance and Control

Most companies implement quality assurance and control procedures for a variety of reasons such as customer safety and regulatory compliance. In addition, quality assurance issues can cost your business millions, so establishing quality management protocols is a key step in operational planning.

Key Performance Indicators

It’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the productivity of your business operations. You can define as many KPIs as needed for all your business processes. For example, you can define KPIs for marketing, sales, product development and other key departments in your company. This can include product launch deadlines, number of manufactured goods, number of customer service cases closed, number of 5-star reviews received, number of customers acquired, revenue increased by a certain percentage and so on.

Risks, Assumptions and Constraints

Note any potential risks, assumptions and time or resource constraints that might affect your business operations.

Free Operational Plan Template

Leverage everything you’ve learned today with our template. This free operational plan template for Word will help you define your budget, timeline, KPIs and more. It’s the perfect first step in organizing and improving your operations. Download it today.

ProjectManager's free operational plan template for Word.

What Are the Benefits of Operational Planning?

Every plan has a massive effect on all team members involved, and those can be to your company’s benefit or to their detriment. If it’s to their detriment, it’s best to find out as soon as possible so you can modify your operational plan and pivot with ease.

But that’s the whole point of operational planning: you get to see the effect of your operations on the business’s bottom line in real time, or at every benchmark, so you know exactly when to pivot. And with a plan that’s as custom to each department as an operational plan, you know exactly where things go wrong and why.

How ProjectManager Can Help with Operational Planning

Creating and implementing a high-quality operational plan is the best way to ensure that your organization starts out a project on the right foot. ProjectManager has award-winning project management tools to help you craft and execute such a plan.

Gantt charts are essential to create and monitor operational plans effectively. ProjectManager helps you access your Gantt chart online so you can add benchmarks for operational performance reviews. You can also create tasks along with dependencies to make the operation a surefire success.

A screenshot of a gantt chart in ProjectManager

Whether you’re a team of IT system administrators, marketing experts, or engineers, ProjectManager includes robust planning and reporting tools. Plan in sprints, assign due dates, collaborate with team members and track everything with just the click of a button. Plus, we have numerous ready-made project reports that can be generated instantly, including status reports, variance reports, timesheet reports and more.

project status report builder

Related Operations Management Content

  • Operational Strategy: A Quick Guide
  • Operations Management: Key Functions, Roles and Skills
  • Operational Efficiency: A Quick Guide
  • Using Operational Excellence to Be More Productive

Operational planning isn’t done in a silo, and it doesn’t work without the full weight of the team backing it up. Ensure that your department is successful at each benchmark. ProjectManager is an award-winning pm software dedicated to helping businesses smooth out their operational plans for a better year ahead. Sign up for our free 30-day trial today.

Click here to browse ProjectManager's free templates

Deliver your projects on time and under budget

Start planning your projects.

Build Your 2024 AI Transformation Roadmap 🚀

facebook

More Like this

What is the difference between a business plan and a strategic plan.

It is not uncommon that the terms ‘strategic plan’ and ‘business plan’ get confused in the business world. While a strategic plan is a type of business plan, there are several important distinctions between the two types that are worth noting. Before beginning your strategic planning process or strategy implementation, look at the article below to learn the key difference between a business vs strategic plan and how each are important to your organization.

Definition of a business plan vs. a strategic plan

A strategic plan is essential for already established organizations looking for a way to manage and implement their strategic direction and future growth. Strategic planning is future-focused and serves as a roadmap to outline where the organization is going over the next 3-5 years (or more) and the steps it will take to get there.

Get the Free Guide for Setting OKRs that Work (with 100 examples!)

A strategic plan serves 6 functions for an organization that is striving to reach the next level of their growth:.

  • Defines the purpose of the organization.
  • Builds on an organization’s competitive advantages.
  • Communicates the strategy to the staff.
  • Prioritizes the financial needs of the organization.
  • Directs the team to move from plan to action.
  • Creates long-term sustainability and growth impact

Alternatively, a business plan is used by new businesses or organizations trying to get off the ground. The fundamentals of a business plan focus on setting the foundation for the business or organization. While it looks towards the future, the focus is set more on the immediate future (>1 year). Some of the functions of a business plan may overlap with a strategic plan. However, the focus and intentions diverge in a few key areas.

A business plan for new businesses, projects, or organizations serves these 5 functions:

  • Simplifies or explains the objectives and goals of your organization.
  • Coordinates human resource management and determines operational requirements.
  • Secures funding for your organization.
  • Evaluates potential business prospects.
  • Creates a framework for conceptualizing ideas.

In other words, a strategic plan is utilized to direct the momentum and growth of an established company or organization. In contrast, a business plan is meant to set the foundation of a newly (or not quite) developed company by setting up its operational teams, strategizing ways to enter a new market, and obtaining funding.

A strategic plan focuses on long-term growth and the organization’s impact on the market and its customers. Meanwhile, a business plan must focus more on the short-term, day-to-day operational functions. Often, new businesses don’t have the capacity or resources to create a strategic plan, though developing a business plan with strategy elements is never a bad idea.

Business and strategic plans ultimately differ in several key areas–timeframe, target audience, focus, resource allocation, nature, and scalability.

While both a strategic and business plan is forward-facing and focused on future success, a business plan is focused on the more immediate future. A business plan normally looks ahead no further than one year. A business plan is set up to measure success within a 3- to 12-month timeframe and determines what steps a business owner needs to take now to succeed.

A strategic plan generally covers the organizational plan over 3 to 5+ years. It is set with future expansion and development in mind and sets up roadmaps for how the organization will reach its desired future state.

Pro Tip: While a vision statement could benefit a business plan, it is essential to a strategic plan.

Target Audience

A strategic plan is for established companies, businesses, organizations, and owners serious about growing their organizations. A strategic plan communicates the organization’s direction to the staff and stakeholders. The strategic plan is communicated to the essential change makers in the organization who will have a hand in making the progress happen.

A business plan could be for new businesses and entrepreneurs who are start-ups. The target audience for the business plan could also be stakeholders, partners, or investors. However, a business plan generally presents the entrepreneur’s ideas to a bank. It is meant to get the necessary people onboard to obtain the funding needed for the project.

A strategic plan provides focus, direction, and action to move the organization from where they are now to where they want to go. A strategic plan may consist of several months of studies, analyses, and other processes to gauge an organization’s current state. The strategy officers may conduct an internal and external analysis, determine competitive advantages, and create a strategy roadmap. They may take the time to redefine their mission, vision, and values statements.

Alternatively, a business plan provides a structure for ideas to define the business initially. It maps out the more tactical beginning stages of the plan.

Pro Tip: A mission statement is useful for business and strategic plans as it helps further define the enterprise’s value and purpose. If an organization never set its mission statement at the beginning stages of its business plan, it can create one for its strategic plan.

A strategic plan is critical to prioritizing resources (time, money, and people) to grow the revenue and increase the return on investment. The strategic plan may start with reallocating current financial resources already being utilized more strategically.

A business plan will focus on the resources the business still needs to obtain, such as vendors, investors, staff, and funding. A business plan is critical if new companies seek funding from banks or investors. It will add accountability and transparency for the organization and tell the funding channels how they plan to grow their business operations and ROI in the first year of the business.

The scalability of a business plan vs. strategic plan

Another way to grasp the difference is by understanding the difference in ‘scale’ between strategic and business plans. Larger organizations with multiple business units and a wide variety of products frequently start their annual planning process with a corporate-driven strategic plan. It is often followed by departmental and marketing plans that work from the Strategic Plan.

Smaller and start-up companies typically use only a business plan to develop all aspects of operations of the business on paper, obtain funding and then start the business.

Why understanding the differences between a business plan vs a strategic plan matters

It is important to know the key differences between the two terms, despite often being used interchangeably. But here’s a simple final explanation:

A business plan explains how a new business will get off the ground. A strategic plan answers where an established organization is going in the future and how they intend to reach that future state.

A strategic plan also focuses on building a sustainable competitive advantage and is futuristic. A business plan is used to assess the viability of a business opportunity and is more tactical.

10 Comments

' src=

I agree with your analysis about small companies, but they should do a strategic plan. Just check out how many of the INC 500 companies have an active strategic planning process and they started small. Its about 78%,

' src=

Strategic management is a key role of any organization even if belong to small business. it help in growth and also to steam line your values. im agree with kristin.

' src=

I agree with what you said, without strategic planning no organization can survive whether it is big or small. Without a clear strategic plan, it is like walking in the darkness.. Best Regards..

' src=

Vision, Mission in Business Plan VS Strategic Plan ?

' src=

you made a good analysis on strategic plan and Business plan the difference is quite clear now. But on the other hand, it seems that strategic plan and strategic management are similar which I think not correct. Please can you tell us the difference between these two?. Thanks

' src=

Thank you. I get points to work on it

' src=

super answer Thanking you

' src=

Hi. I went through all the discussions, comments and replies. Thanks! I got a very preliminary idea about functions and necessity of Strategic Planning in Business. But currently I am looking for a brief nice, flowery, juicy definition of “Business Strategic Planning” as a whole, which will give anyone a fun and interesting way to understand. Can anyone help me out please? Awaiting replies…… 🙂

' src=

that was easy to understand,

' src=

Developing a strategic plan either big or small company or organization mostly can’t achieve its goal. A strategic plan or formulation is the first stage of the strategic management plan, therefore, we should be encouraged to develop a strategic management plan. We can develop the best strategic plan but without a clear plan of implementation and evaluation, it will be difficult to achieve goals.

Comments Cancel

Join 60,000 other leaders engaged in transforming their organizations., subscribe to get the latest agile strategy best practices, free guides, case studies, and videos in your inbox every week..

Keystone

Leading strategy? Join our FREE community.

Become a member of the chief strategy officer collaborative..

OnStrategy Collaborative

Free monthly sessions and exclusive content.

Do you want to 2x your impact.

business operational and strategic plan

  • Get Started

Home >> #realtalk Blog >> Manage a business >> Business plan, strat…

Business plan, strategic plan, operational plan: why all 3 are important

By Andrea Nazarian

business operational and strategic plan

When you’re in the early stages of running your business, it’s easy to get lost when thinking about all the things you need to organize in order to grow. This is where making a business plan, strategic plan and operational plan comes into play. 

A business plan outlines the “what” and “how” of your business, while a strategic plan sets the long-term vision. Operational plans dive into day-to-day tasks. We’ll explain their roles, differences, and how they work together. 

In this post, we’ll break down these concepts, explain the difference between them and why all three are important.  By understanding these plans, you’ll gain the tools to steer your ship, set big goals, and navigate the everyday waters with confidence and success.

Get your team in sync with our easy-to-use, all-in-one employee app.

What is a business plan?

A business plan, just like a blueprint for building a house, shows the general path for your business to follow. Besides the essential facts, it’s the tool that conveys your vision to potential investors, partners, and your own team.

A business plan is your business’s roadmap to success. It’s a detailed guide that helps you understand where your business is headed and how to get there. In this plan, you outline your business goals, what products or services you offer, who your customers are, and how you’ll reach them. 

Writing a business plan is one of many tips for starting a business you can tap into to get off the ground. 

Your business plan includes financials 

Your business plan also includes financial details, like how much money you’ll need and how you’ll make money. It’s important to outline everything because it helps you make smarter decisions, attract investors or loans, and stay on track as you grow. 

Think of your business plan as a game plan that keeps you focused and prepared for whatever comes your way.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is a detailed plan that lays out where you want your business to be in the future and how you’ll get there. In this plan, you outline your long-term goals, the actions you’ll take to move towards those goals, and the major steps to reach those goals.

A strategic plan helps you make smart choices about things like which products to focus on, how to stand out from competitors, and where to expand. It’s like your compass for making decisions that match your vision. 

Goal setting in your strategic plan 

Setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time bound) is a clear way to put your strategic plan into actionable tasks. 

This plan also keeps you flexible – you can adjust it as your business grows and the market changes. By having a solid strategic plan, you’re setting yourself up for success, making sure all your actions lead to reaching those big dreams you have for your business.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan is where the nitty-gritty of running your business happens. An operational plan is like your playbook for your day-to-day tasks . 

It spells out exactly how you’ll execute your strategies outlined in your strategic plan and reach your goals outlined in your business plan.

In your operational plan, you break things down: who’s doing what, when and how. It’s like giving clear instructions to your team on tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities.

From managing the kitchen in a restaurant to handling customer orders in a salon, it’s all in the operational plan.

It also covers how you’ll maintain quality, manage resources, and handle any bumps along the way. Think of it as your action plan – turning your grand ideas into reality, step by step. 

What’s the difference between a business plank, strategic plan and operational plan?

Business plan.

  • Focus: This is the big blueprint for your entire business. It explains what your business does, who your customers are, how you’ll make money, and your long-term goals.
  • Timeframe: Usually covers a few years and includes financial projections.
  • Use: It’s your pitch to investors and guides your business decisions.

Strategic plan:

  • Focus: This is the long-term vision. It’s about where you want your business to go and the major steps to get there.
  • Timeframe: Often covers 3-5 years.
  • Use: It guides big choices like expanding, new products, and setting direction.

Operational plan:

  • Focus: This is the detailed game plan for your day-to-day business operations. It’s about how you’ll execute your strategies.
  • Timeframe: Covers the short term, usually a year or less.
  • Use: It’s the instructions for your team on tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities.

In short, a business plan is your overall roadmap, a strategic plan sets the direction for growth, and an operational plan makes sure everything runs smoothly day by day. They work together to keep your business on track and thriving.

Why is having a business plan, strategic plan and operational plan important?

Having a business plan, a strategic plan, and an operational plan is like having a superhero trio for your business. Here’s why they’re so important:

Business Plan:

  • Clarity: It gives you a clear path for your business journey. You know what you’re doing, who your customers are, and how to make money.
  • Guidance: It helps you make smart choices and stay on track to reach your goals.
  • Attractiveness: Investors and lenders like to see a solid plan before supporting your business.

Strategic Plan:

  • Direction: It’s like a compass for your long-term vision. It tells you where your business is headed and how to get there.
  • Big Goals: It sets ambitious goals like growing big, launching new things, and standing out from the crowd.
  • Adaptation: It helps you adjust when things change, keeping your business aligned with your dreams.

Operational Plan:

  • Smooth Sailing: It’s your step-by-step guide for daily tasks. You know who does what and when.
  • Efficiency: It makes things run smoothly and helps you manage resources well.
  • Quality Control: It ensures your products or services are top-notch and consistent.

Together, these plans are like your business’s superpowers. They make sure your business is not just surviving, but thriving..

Strategic plan example

Let’s say your restaurant, Brenda’s Bistro, wants to become the ultimate dining spot in your community, celebrated for your fantastic dishes and top-notch hospitality.

Brenda’s Bistro’s mission is to create unforgettable dining experiences by offering a diverse menu crafted from locally sourced ingredients, while delivering outstanding customer service.

  • Achieve a 20% increase in revenue within the next two years.
  • Expand the customer base by targeting families and young professionals through special promotions.
  • Introduce a new themed menu every season to keep customers excited and engaged.

Strategies and Initiatives:

  • Strengthen Brenda’s Bistro online presence by sharing engaging content on your website and social media accounts regularly.
  • Partner with local farmers to ensure your ingredients are fresh, sustainable, and support the community.
  • Launch loyalty programs and offer discounts to encourage repeat visits.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

  • Monitor revenue growth every quarter to track progress toward your goal.
  • Collect customer feedback through surveys and online reviews to measure satisfaction.
  • Evaluate the success of your seasonal menus based on the number of orders and positive feedback.

How to make a strategic plan

Crafting a strategic plan isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal; each company’s unique goals require a tailored approach. 

Let’s break down the essential steps to shape that core plan.

1. Gather the key people

Start by bringing together the important voices. This usually includes your executive board, managers, and sometimes outside investors. 

Their insights and suggestions are like puzzle pieces that fit into a successful strategic plan.

2: Find your business’ strengths and weaknesses 

Your strategy needs to know where your company stands both inside and out. Begin with a SWOT analysis, checking your internal strengths and weaknesses, plus external opportunities and threats. 

Gather insights from gap analysis, looking at competitors, and listening to customer and employee feedback give you the bigger picture.

3. Set Goals

Now, create goals from all that info. Match these goals with your mission, vision, and values. 

Pick the ones that make a big impact, make sense for the long haul, and line up with your values. Examples can be reaching certain sales targets, or a certain number of followers on your business’ social media. 

4.Make a game plan 

Time for an action plan. Break down each goal into strategies, initiatives, and tactics. Depending on your goals, these could be marketing plans , tech upgrades, or smart partnerships. 

You don’t need tons of details here; that’s what the operational plan covers. Also, set up key performance metrics to measure your progress.

5. Review and and tweak

Schedule regular check-ins to review your plan. This is where you reflect and adjust if needed. Good financial info comes in handy here. 

How often you do this depends on your business’s rhythm – maybe monthly for new businesses or yearly for more established ones.

Remember, your strategic plan is your map to success. Tailor it, review it, and let it guide you toward your goals.

Now that your strategic plan is sorted, let’s dive into the power of operational planning to make those goals a reality.

How to make an operational plan

It’s time to take that big-picture strategic plan and break it into doable steps. First, check out the long-term goals. 

Figure out which departments need to team up to reach which goal. Ask questions like: What kind of resources does the business already have access to? 

What’s missing? Any money financial risks coming up? This helps you see which parts of your business need a boost to hit those goals.

1. Nail down your budget

Make a budget based on what each department in your business needs to reach the big goals. What does your kitchen staff need? How about front-of-house staff?

With your match-up between goals and areas, spread your budget where it’ll give the best bang for your buck. 

Remember to keep some cash aside for surprises and changes. A solid budget is like a shield against unexpected stuff.

2. Set targets

Each goal you’re chasing needs a target. Think carefully here – not too wild that your team loses heart, but not too tiny that the big plan stays out of reach. 

Realistic targets are your secret weapon. An example target could be selling 100 orders’ worth of a certain dish by the end of the month.

3. Check in with your team regularly 

Don’t just set and forget. Schedule regular check-ins with your staff to see how things are going. 

Are you hitting those targets? Are things humming along? 

These feedback sessions with your employees are like checkups for your plan. If things are off, you can tweak the plan to get back on track.

Homebase’s free mobile app has a built-in messenger tool to make it easy to stay connected. Send messages to individuals, groups, or your entire team.

3. Stay open and data-driven

Keep communication flowing during reviews. And don’t forget the data – it’s your treasure map. 

Numbers show where you’re doing well and where there’s room to improve. Use your POS software or an employee management tool like Homebase to help you make data-informed decisions on how to improve your business operations. 

With Homebase’s workforce forecasting and smart scheduling tools, you can save on labor costs for your business. 

With all this, your operational plan becomes a real powerhouse, making sure your business charges ahead toward those big dreams.

Make your business plan, strategic plan and operational plan work for you

In the bustling world of business, having a roadmap is essential for success. The triumphant trio of a business plan, strategic plan, and operational plan work together to steer your ship towards greatness. 

These plans aren’t just fancy paperwork – they’re important tools that guide your every move. 

By understanding each plan’s role and significance, you’re armed with the superpowers needed to navigate the complex business waters. 

A business plan provides clarity, a strategic plan offers direction, and an operational plan ensures smooth sailing. Together, they fuel your business’s journey from survival to thriving, making sure you’re not just a player in the game, but a true champion.

Here are 10 small business tools you can use to put these three plans into action. 

FAQs about business plan, strategic plan and operational plan

Why do i need a business plan.

A business plan acts as a roadmap for your business journey. It outlines your goals, customers, and how you’ll make money. It’s crucial for attracting investors and making smart decisions. 

What’s the purpose of a strategic plan?

A strategic plan sets your long-term vision and goals. It guides big choices like expanding and standing out. It’s like a compass, helping you stay on course towards success.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan and an operational plan?

While a strategic plan sets long-term goals, an operational plan focuses on day-to-day tasks. It’s like a playbook that tells your team exactly what to do to reach those goals.

Remember:  This is not legal advice. If you have questions about your particular situation, please consult a lawyer, CPA, or other appropriate professional advisor or agency.

Related posts

February 23, 2024

The 6 best GPS time clock solutions in 2024

Business owners on the hunt for an effective GPS time clock may know that, unlike regular time tracking tools, apps…

6 best remote employee time clock apps for 2024

In the age of remote work and flexible schedules, keeping track of employee work hours can be challenging. Luckily, time…

Best Homebase alternatives (to help you choose the right solution for your business)

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever for small businesses like stores or rental companies to manage their teams. Managers no longer…

February 22, 2024

Gross Pay & Gross Wage: What It Is & How to Calculate It

Payroll and finances are among the many processes small business owners need to be familiar with to achieve business success…

February 19, 2024

Cash Flow for New Business Owners

Cash flow, profit, expenses, revenue. Financial terms can make your head spin as a new business owner. Don’t worry though,…

February 15, 2024

10 Best Square Alternatives for 2024

Square is a popular software solution for small businesses in the retail, hospitality, and restaurant industries. You can use the…

Subscribe to our newsletter

Looking for ways to stay up to date on employment laws and small business news?

Homebase makes managing hourly work easier for over 100,000 local businesses. With free employee scheduling , time tracking , and team communication , managers and employees can spend less time on paperwork and more time on growing their business.

  • Hiring & onboarding
  • Team communication
  • Employee happiness
  • HR & compliance
  • Integrations
  • Food & beverage
  • Beauty & wellness
  • Medical & veterinary
  • Home & repair
  • Hospitality & leisure
  • Education & caregiving
  • Contact sales
  • Become a Partner
  • Careers – We’re hiring!
  • #realtalk Blog

ConsultingEdge.net

Strategic and Operational Planning: What’s the Difference?

As a business owner, you might think what is the difference between strategic and operational planning. Basically, these are the time frame in which the plans take place. While this may be true, it’s not the only difference.

The importance of strategic and operational planning in business cannot be overstated. Operational planners tend to be more tactical in nature, while strategists may have less emphasis on tactics and more on vision. The two processes are interconnected, with one affecting the other.

For instance, if a company has an aggressive goal for growth that exceeds its capacity, then operations would need to change or grow so that they can support this new strategy.

This blog post will explore the differences in detail so you can decide which type of plan would be best for your business needs.

What is the Strategic Planning?

A strategic planning process is a systematic approach to developing and implementing an organization’s strategy. It is a dynamic process that begins with the identification of an organization’s goals, objectives, and aspirations.

The process includes analysis, goal-setting, and future planning. Strategic planning is a long-term strategy that the organization’s top management or senior leadership team implement. The major roles of this group are setting goals for the company, developing strategies that will help achieve those goals, evaluating progress made towards achieving them, etc.

How to do Strategic Planning:

Strategic Planning includes five stages – visioning, analysis, decision making, implementation, and evaluation.

The first stage of the process is Visioning which involves setting goals for what you want your company or organization to look like in the future.

The analysis is the second stage where you take time to think about how best to achieve your goals.

Decision-making is next where you make decisions on how to move forward with your plans based on information gathered during analysis.

Implementation occurs when all decisions are put into place and work begins on achieving those objectives.

Finally, Evaluation takes place at the end of each stage to assess how things are going and if they need changes.

Benefits of Strategic Planning:

Strategic planning is a process for achieving your goals. It requires you to plan ahead, identify what resources are needed, and execute the appropriate strategies to achieve your desired outcomes. But why should you bother?

Here are just a few of the benefits of strategic planning:

Better allocation of time and money towards projects that will give you the most payoff.

  • Reduce the risks associated with making mistakes.
  • Help organizations design a complete blueprint for their future.
  • More control over the progress of different aspects of the organization.
  • Less stressed because there’s no guessing about what needs to happen.
  • Help the organization to stay competitive, and providing guidance when making decisions.

What is the Operational Planning?

Operational planning is the process of implementing a strategic plan that has been developed by decision-makers. Operational planners start with mapping out a timeline for a project, carrying out specific tasks, or both.

It consists of determining how to accomplish an organization’s objectives and meet its goals. This planning also involves setting up the necessary structures, systems, people, and resources required to implement it all. An organization needs operational plans when there can be no slip-ups or flexibility in execution; if something fails then everything fails too.

How to do Operational Planning:

Operational plans can vary depending on the size and complexity of a company or organization. Many small businesses only need to plan out their day-to-day activities. However, larger organizations develop more comprehensive plans that cover longer periods and may consist of many smaller project plans within them.

Companies should begin by developing clear goals for what they want to achieve; it will use as guidelines during the operations planning stage.

Next, you define strategies with specific action steps listed in order to meet those objectives. It includes who is responsible for each step and how deadlines are going to be met.

Finally, operational planners create an overall timeline along with milestones so all team members know when key deliverables are expected from one another. Then you go into action!

Benefits of Operational Planning:

Operational planning is usually smaller in scope and easier to implement. It is more tactical, while Strategic Planning is strategic. Operational Plans should be a part of the larger Strategic Plan so that they mesh together well with your goals and values.

Here are some of the benefits of operation planning;

  • Helps businesses achieve short-term goals.
  • Contribute to the big picture goal of the business.
  • Helps you accomplish your strategic plan.
  • Less time-consuming and needs fewer resources to develop.
  • Help take your business to a whole new level.
  • Map out a timeline for a project, carry out specific tasks, or both.

Difference between Strategic and Operational planning:

Operational and strategic planning may seem like the same thing, but they are actually very different. Both of these Planning are two different types of plans.

Operational planning looks at the immediate future, while strategic planning looks at a span of years into the future.

Operational planners tend to be more tactical in nature, while strategists may have less emphasis on tactics and more on vision.

Strategic planning is the process for determining what a company wants to accomplish in the future, while operational planning is how it plans to achieve these goals.

Operational planners focus on day-to-day tasks. While strategic planners pay attention to macro issues such as market trends and technological developments.

Operational planners rely heavily on data from past performances for their forecasts. While strategists may use some data from past performance, but also include qualitative factors such as new product introductions or changes in consumer behavior that impact business models going forward.

Operational planning is a more tactical process that comes into play on a regular basis to make sure that you complete all the tasks. Strategic planning takes place over the course of weeks or months and looks at what you want your company’s long-term goals to be.

Conclusion:

The idea of strategic and operational planning may seem like an easy distinction to make, but it is not always so clear. Strategic plans are typically general in nature, while operational plans are more detailed.

The key difference between the two types of plans is that strategic ones are long-range goals for your company or organization whereas operational plans take into account short-term goals to help you achieve these over a specific time frame. 

Photo of author

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Clarifying Responsibilities Implementing The RACI Model

Clarifying Responsibilities Implementing The RACI Model

10 Tips to ensure Stakeholder Satisfaction throughout your project

10 Tips to ensure Stakeholder Satisfaction throughout your project

Risk Management: Understanding Risk Capacity, Appetite, and Tolerance

Risk Management: Understanding Risk Capacity, Appetite, and Tolerance

Make or Buy Analysis: The 5 Easy Steps Formula

Make or Buy Analysis: The 5 Easy Steps Formula

How to Use An Action Log? The Ultimate Guide

How to Use An Action Log? The Ultimate Guide

Creating a Project Disaster Recovery Plan

Creating a Project Disaster Recovery Plan

We use essential cookies to make Venngage work. By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.

Manage Cookies

Cookies and similar technologies collect certain information about how you’re using our website. Some of them are essential, and without them you wouldn’t be able to use Venngage. But others are optional, and you get to choose whether we use them or not.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are always on, as they’re essential for making Venngage work, and making it safe. Without these cookies, services you’ve asked for can’t be provided.

Show cookie providers

  • Google Login

Functionality Cookies

These cookies help us provide enhanced functionality and personalisation, and remember your settings. They may be set by us or by third party providers.

Performance Cookies

These cookies help us analyze how many people are using Venngage, where they come from and how they're using it. If you opt out of these cookies, we can’t get feedback to make Venngage better for you and all our users.

  • Google Analytics

Targeting Cookies

These cookies are set by our advertising partners to track your activity and show you relevant Venngage ads on other sites as you browse the internet.

  • Google Tag Manager
  • Infographics
  • Daily Infographics
  • Graphic Design
  • Graphs and Charts
  • Data Visualization
  • Human Resources
  • Training and Development
  • Beginner Guides

Blog Business

10+ Operational Planning Examples to Fulfill your Strategic Goals

By Danesh Ramuthi , Oct 25, 2023

Operational Planning Examples

An operational plan is a comprehensive, action-driven document that maps out how daily activities within an organization fuel the journey towards achieving strategic objectives.

Essentially acting as the nexus between high-level strategy and practical execution, this plan ensures that every department, from human resources to specific departments, operates in synchrony, aligning their day-to-day activities with the broader strategic goals.

By streamlining processes, it fosters cohesive efforts amongst diverse cross-functional teams, ensuring that both individual team members and entire departments work together harmoniously towards the company goals.

Ready to sculpt your organization’s future? Start your journey with venngage business plan maker and leverage their expertly crafted operational plan templates . 

Click to jump ahead: 

Why is an operational plan important?

10 operational plan examples, what should an operational plan include, how to write an operational plan.

  • Strategic plan vs operational plan: What is the difference? 

In summary 

An operational plan is crucial because it serves as a bridge between a company’s high-level strategic planning and its day-to-day activities, ensuring that the business operations align with the strategic goals. 

While a strategic plan provides a long-term vision, outlining the company’s objectives and goals to gain competitive advantages in the business environment, the operational plan outlines the specific actions, key elements and resource allocation required to achieve those objectives. 

For example, while the strategic plan might set a goal for revenue growth over the fiscal year, the operational plan provides a detailed roadmap, breaking down major projects, assigning responsibilities to individual team members or specific departments and setting key performance indicators to monitor progress and ensure the entire organization works together effectively.

Operational planning, in essence, transforms the strategic objectives into actionable plans, ensuring that the entire team, from department heads to diverse cross-functional teams, is aligned and works in tandem to support revenue growth, increase productivity, and achieve the desired outcomes. 

Operational plans, through a well-structured operational planning process, also provide a clear understanding of the day-to-day activities, allowing team members to know their roles, leading to better collaboration and synergy. 

Moreover, by having clear operational plan examples or templates, businesses can ensure realistic expectations, manage their operating budget effectively and track progress through key performance metrics, thus ensuring that the company stays on course to realize its long-term vision.

Operational plans play a pivotal role in the business landscape, bridging the gap between strategic vision and tangible actions. They translate the overarching goals of an organization into detailed procedures, ensuring that daily operations are in line with the desired strategic outcomes. 

In the section below, I will explore a few operational plan examples, shedding light on their structure and importance.

Business operational plan example

A business operational plan is a comprehensive document that elucidates the specific day-to-day activities of a company. It presents a detailed overview of the company’s organizational structure, management team, products or services and the underlying marketing and sales strategies. 

For businesses, irrespective of their size, an operational plan can prove invaluable. By laying down the business goals and objectives, it acts as a blueprint, guiding entrepreneurs through the creation and implementation of strategies and action plans. The planning process also incorporates mechanisms to track progress and performance. 

Additionally, for startups or companies looking to scale, a meticulously crafted operational plan can be pivotal in securing funds from potential investors and lenders.

Business Operational Plan Template

Layered on this are details about the company’s organizational structure, its products or services and its marketing and sales strategies. 

The document also delineates the roles and responsibilities of each team member, especially the management and key personnel. Given the dynamic nature of the business environment, it is imperative to revisit and update the operational plan regularly.

Related: 15+ Business Plan Templates for Strategic Planning

Simple operational plan example

A simple operational plan, often used by startups or smaller enterprises, emphasizes the basics, ensuring that the fundamental aspects of the business operations are captured succinctly. While it might not delve into the intricacies of every operation, it provides an overview of day-to-day activities, highlighting the goals and objectives the business aims to achieve in the short term.

Green Sage Simple Clean Yellow Operational Plan

In essence, this plan revolves around core elements like the company’s main objectives for the fiscal year, key responsibilities assigned to individual team members and basic resource allocation. A straightforward market analysis might also be included, offering insights into customer needs and competitive advantages the business hopes to leverage.

Simple Clean Yellow Operational Plan

Though simple, this operational plan example remains pivotal for the organization. It provides a roadmap, guiding team members through their daily responsibilities while ensuring that everyone is working together towards shared goals. It becomes especially essential for diverse cross-functional teams, where clarity of roles can lead to increased productivity.

Colorful Shape Simple Operational Plan

Modern operational plan example

In today’s fast-paced business environment, the emphasis on efficiency and innovative processes is paramount. The modern operational plan example caters precisely to this demand. Ideal for organizations aiming to streamline processes and highlight workflow, this type of operational plan emphasizes a more dynamic approach to planning. 

Modern Clean Orange Operational Plan

It not only reflects the evolving nature of business operations but also provides a modern backdrop for content, ensuring that the presentation resonates with the current trends and technological advancements. The use of modern tools and platforms within this plan enables diverse cross-functional teams to work together seamlessly, ensuring that day-to-day activities are synchronized with the company’s long-term vision.

Clean Modern Shape Operational Plan

Furthermore, such an operational plan helps the entire organization stay agile, adapting rapidly to changes in the business environment and ensuring alignment with strategic goals.

Minimalist operational plan example

The minimalist operational plan example champions simplicity and clarity. By focusing on clear and concise business strategies, it eliminates any potential ambiguity, ensuring that team members and stakeholders have an unclouded understanding of the company’s objectives and goals. 

Simple Minimalist Operational Plan

The minimalist design not only promotes easy comprehension but also aligns with the modern trend of decluttering, ensuring that only the most vital components of the operational planning process are highlighted. 

This approach leaves no room for confusion, streamlining the planning process and making sure that individual team members and departments are aligned with the business’s key objectives. 

White Clean Lines Minimalist Operational Plan

Moreover, the flexibility offered by a minimalist design allows businesses to craft an operational plan template that is not only functional but also accurately reflects their brand image and core values, ensuring cohesion across all aspects of the business strategy.

Blue And Orange Minimalist Modern Operational Plan

Clean operational plan example

The clean operational plan example stands as a testament to this principle. Ideal for businesses that prioritize clarity and directness, this format seeks to convey goals and strategies without overwhelming stakeholders. 

While maintaining a neat and organized layout, it ensures that tasks are managed effectively, helping team members grasp their roles and responsibilities without getting lost in excessive details.

Pink Retro Clean Operational Plan

One of the primary advantages of a clean operational plan is its ability to eliminate distractions and focus solely on the critical aspects of operational planning. 

Such a design aids in making sure that diverse cross-functional teams can work together harmoniously ensuring that day-to-day activities align seamlessly with the company’s long-term vision. 

The simplicity of the clean operational plan not only supports revenue growth by ensuring efficiency but also reinforces the company’s strategic goals, making it an excellent tool in the arsenal of businesses that believe in clear communication and precise execution.  

An effective operational plan acts as a roadmap, directing how resources should be allocated and tasks should be performed to meet the company’s objectives. Here’s what a comprehensive operational plan should encompass:

  • Goals and objectives : Whether short-term or long-term, the operational plan should define clear goals and objectives that align with the company’s strategic plan. This gives direction to the entire organization, ensuring everyone is working towards a common aim.
  • Clear responsibilities for team members : It’s essential that team members understand their roles within the operational plan. By outlining who is responsible for what, the plan ensures that there are no overlaps or gaps in duties and that everyone has clarity on their day-to-day activities.
  • Assigned tasks: Alongside responsibilities, specific tasks need to be allocated to individual team members or specific departments. This granularity in assignment ensures that every aspect of the operational plan is covered.
  • Timeline: This provides a clear schedule for when each task or objective should start and finish. A well-defined timeline assists in monitoring progress and ensures that the plan stays on track.
  • Budget and resources : Every operational plan needs to factor in the budget and resources available. This includes everything from the operating budget to human resources, ensuring that the business has everything it needs to execute the plan effectively.

Read Also: 6 Steps to Create a Strategic HR Plan [With Templates]

As businesses evolve, it’s essential to have a comprehensive and adaptive operational plan in place to navigate the complexities of the business environment. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you craft an effective operational plan:

Step 1: Define your goals and objectives

Begin with a clear understanding of your strategic goals and objectives. This will act as a foundation for your operational plan. Ensure that these goals are in alignment with your company’s strategic plan and provide both short-term and long-term visions for the business.

Step 2: Determine roles and responsibilities

Identify the key stakeholders, department heads and team members who will play pivotal roles in executing the plan. Assign responsibilities to ensure that everyone knows their part in the planning process and day-to-day activities.

Step 3: Develop a timeline and milestones

Establish a clear timeline that breaks down the operational planning process. Include key milestones to track progress and ensure the plan remains on target.

Step 4: Allocate budget and resources

Determine the resources required to achieve your goals and objectives. This includes estimating the operating budget, identifying human resources needs and other resource allocations, ensuring you have everything in place to support revenue growth and other business needs.

Step 5: Outline day-to-day operations

Detail the day activities that are integral to the business operations. This will provide clarity on how different tasks and functions work together, ensuring efficiency across diverse cross-functional teams.

Step 6: Monitor and measure performance

Integrate key performance metrics and indicators to regularly monitor progress. Using both leading and lagging indicators will provide a comprehensive view of how well the operational plan is being executed and where improvements can be made.

Step 7: Review and adjust regularly

The business environment is dynamic and as such, your operational plan should be adaptable. Regularly review the plan, comparing actual outcomes with desired outcomes and adjust as necessary to account for changes in the business environment or company goals.

Step 8: Document and communicate

Create an operational plan document, potentially using operational plan examples or an operational plan template for guidance. Ensure that the entire team, from individual team members to the entire organization, is informed and aligned with the plan.

Related: 7 Best Business Plan Software for 2023

Strategic plan vs operational plan: What is the difference?

When running an organization, both strategic and operational planning play pivotal roles in ensuring success. However, each has a distinct purpose, time horizon and scope. Here’s a breakdown of the differences between these two essential business plans:

  • Strategic plan : This plan sets the course for the organization’s future. It embodies the long-term vision and mission, detailing the objectives necessary to achieve it. The essence is how everyone, from C-suite executives to individual team members, collaborates towards realizing this vision.
  • Operational plan : This is the roadmap for the day-to-day activities of the organization. While the strategic plan looks at the bigger picture, the operational plan hones in on the tactics and execution. It is crafted to support organizational goals with a focus on short-term activities specific to departments or functions.

Time horizon :

  • Strategic plan : Long-term in nature, usually spanning three to five years.
  • Operational plan : Concentrates on the short-term, with plans laid out yearly, quarterly, or even monthly.

Modification and updates :

  • Strategic plan : This evolves over longer intervals, typically three to five years. There might be minor adjustments year over year based on changing business needs and the external business environment.
  • Operational plan : Due to its short-term focus, it requires frequent assessments. Plans might be adjusted yearly, quarterly or even monthly to ensure alignment with the strategic objectives and current business environment.

Created by :

  • Strategic plan : Crafted by the upper echelons of management – think CEO, CFO and other C-suite members.
  • Operational plan : These plans come to life through mid-level management and department heads, ensuring alignment with the broader strategic vision while catering to specific departmental needs.
  • Strategic plan : Broad in its outlook, it takes into account external factors like market trends, competition, customer needs and technological innovations.
  • Operational plan : This narrows down the focus to the internal workings of the organization. It revolves around technology in use, key performance indicators, budgeting, projects, tasks and the allocation of responsibilities among team members.

As we’ve traversed through the importance of operational planning to various operational plan examples, it becomes evident that having a detailed and efficient operational plan is pivotal. 

From the business-centric to the minimalist approach, every operational plan serves as the backbone, guiding team members and ensuring that day-to-day activities align with the long-term vision and strategic goals.

By knowing what should be included in these plans and how to craft them, businesses can navigate the complexities of their operational environment with greater confidence.

For those looking to refine their planning process or start from scratch, the world of digital tools has made it significantly easier. Venngage offers business plan maker and operational plan templates designed to simplify the process. 

Whether you need to create an operational plan or draft a business strategy, their intuitive platform can guide you every step of the way.

  • Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Strategic Planning and Operational Planning

strategic vs operational planning

Strategic Planning is concentrated towards attaining the long-term objectives of business. On the other hand, operational planning is done to achieve short-term objectives of the company. These are used to set priorities and align the resources, in such a way that leads to the accomplishment of business goals. Take a read of the article given below, to understand the difference between strategic planning and operational planning.

Content: Strategic Planning Vs Operational Planning

Comparison chart, definition of strategic planning.

Strategic Planning is a planning process undertaken by the top level management, to decide Where the organization wants to reach in future? And What should be done to pursue the organizational vision, mission, and objectives? It is an analytical process which examines the micro and macro environment of business. The process is used to define the company’s vision, ambitions, and set priorities to make a route that will lead the company towards its ultimate goal.

strategic planning process

Strategic Planning Process

The planning is not made for a particular department or unit, but it covers the entire organization. The strategic planning is done to determine the factors of the internal and external environment which directly influences the organization. The plan focuses on the enduring development of the organization. The tools used in this process are:

  • SWOT  Analysis  (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)
  • Portfolio Analysis
  • PEST Analysis (Political, Economic, Social, Technological Environment)
  • Porter’s 5 forces Analysis (New Entrants, Rival Sellers, Substitute Products, Buyer Bargaining Power, Supplier Bargaining Power)
  • BCG Matrix (Boston Consulting Group)

These tools help the management to design a strategy considering various elements, that will lead the organization towards its vision.

Definition of Operational Planning

The process which predetermines the day to day activities of the business is known as Operational Planning. The planning is done to support the strategic planning to accomplish the organizational goals. In this process, short run objectives of the company are determined as well as a means to achieve those objectives are also discovered.

Middle-level management performs the function of the operational planning process. It includes planning of regular business activities and operations for a short period. Under this process, the organization is classified into the various department, division, unit, and center for which planning is performed individually, which is aligned with the strategic planning to reach the organization’s vision. The following are the features of Operational Planning:

  • Objectives need to be clearly defined.
  • Achievement of the desired result.
  • The activities are to be performed as decided.
  • Maintenance of quality standards.
  • Measuring performance.

Key Differences Between Strategic Planning and Operational Planning

The following are the differences between strategic planning and operational planning:

  • The planning to pursue the organization’s vision is known as Strategic Planning. The planning to achieve the tactical objectives of the organization is known as Operational Planning.
  • Strategic Planning is long lasting as compared Operational Planning.
  • Operational Planning is done to support Strategic Planning.
  • Strategic Planning takes into account the internal as well as the external environment of business. Conversely, Operational Planning is concerned with the internal environment of business.
  • Strategic Planning is done by top level management, whereas the Operational Planning is a function of middle-level management.
  • Strategic Planning covers the whole organization, but Operational Planning is done in a particular unit or department of the organization.

As we have discussed in the beginning that planning can be done for anything, so in a business organization it can be done for various purposes right from reaching the vision to its regular business activities, but their names, ways, and planning techniques are different. Strategic Planning and Operational Planning are two types of planning process performed by the managers and executives of the organization.

Strategic Plans are made to achieve the vision, mission, goals, and objectives. On the other hand, Operational Plans are made to effectively perform the basic activities of the business in order to achieve tactical objectives.

You Might Also Like:

Strategy formulation vs Strategy implementation

Sachin says

April 26, 2016 at 4:25 pm

Very true thanks

Tewabe Bayih says

November 24, 2017 at 6:59 pm

oh, it is good explanation and thanks !!

Nyame Asem says

January 22, 2019 at 10:37 pm

The distinction between strategic planning and operational planning is very clearly presented. Thanks

March 7, 2019 at 9:25 pm

Mukesh says

April 25, 2020 at 6:17 pm

Very nice topic

TSHERIING says

May 2, 2020 at 6:38 pm

dear all this is lock down period but found all write ups crisp and informative thanks

Debtor Finance says

May 20, 2020 at 3:57 pm

I think that it’s very important for us to know the difference between Strategic Planning and Operational Planning especially if we are in the business industry. This is a very helpful site. Thanks for sharing this article.

May 27, 2020 at 9:07 pm

Thank you for your explanation. I’m a student in healthcare finance right now and this helps tremendously!

JOSEPH Arrey Mbu says

April 24, 2021 at 2:17 pm

Clear and elaborate. Thanks.

CAO JIN says

September 24, 2021 at 1:30 pm

Learned great knowledge.

Taylor Hicken says

December 28, 2021 at 8:31 am

I appreciated it

gebreegziabher says

August 3, 2022 at 5:57 pm

October 5, 2022 at 1:14 pm

We well appreciate the effort thanks

Rajesh Chandan says

March 25, 2023 at 6:52 pm

Very well explained in simple manner

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

xSME-Strategy-Logo-600px.png.pagespeed.ic.gDvrGDTiKf

  • Our Approach
  • Strategic Planning Facilitator Services
  • Strategy and Leadership Podcast
  • SME Strategy on Youtube
  • Members Only Resources
  • Strategy and Leadership Community
  • Online Courses

What is the Difference Between a Strategic Plan and an Operational Plan?

By Jenna Sedmak - September 24, 2019

business operational and strategic plan

A common misunderstanding we encounter when working with organizations is the difference between strategic planning and operational planning. While the two are closely connected, it’s important to understand how they are different and how your organization can use both types of plans to move the needle forward on your goals.

If your organization is looking for a strategic planning facilitator to align your team and reach your vision, SME Strategy can help. Contact us today or view our service offerings:

View faciliation options and costs

Many organizations mistakenly believe they have developed a strategic plan after meeting with their team and creating a list of short, medium and long-term tasks and projects. However, strategic planning is a high-level, macro activity that hones in on your organization’s strategic priority areas and goals for the mid to long-term range. A strong strategic plan serves as a roadmap to follow from where you are now, to where you want to be. An operational plan, however, focuses in on the micro, or the day-to-day, and weekly actions that can help your people achieve organizational goals.

Therefore, strategy is working ON your business, while operations is working IN your business. 

To maximize your next strategic planning facilitation session, we recommend familiarizing yourself (and your team) with the strategic and operational planning processes.

Strategic Planning:

The best way to imagine a strategic plan is to think of the big picture of your organization. This is the outer layer of your entire plan, which contains smaller and shorter-term actions on the inside. If you’ve never developed a strategic plan, or are developing a new strategic plan, it’s important to evaluate your vision, mission, and values before diving into your strategies, goals, and tactics. Watch : What is Strategic Planning?

The strategic plan asks questions about the organization such as: 

  • What do we do and why do we do it?
  • Who do we do it for? 
  • What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
  • What obstacles or roadblocks might we encounter? Watch : How to Build a Risk Register
  • Where is our organization now, and where do we want to go in the future?
  • Which key areas do we want to focus on?  
  • Watch : How Much Does Strategic Planning Cost?

Priorities and goals should be limited to a select few to allow follow-through, as well as a cyclical feedback loop where progress is assessed and changes are made on an ongoing basis through a set meeting cadence and/or quarterly strategy review meetings.

While strategic planning is usually led by the leadership team or a strategic planning consultant , it’s important that employees (or department managers for larger organizations) are consulted to ensure buy-in for the final plan. Here's a more in-depth look at the strategic planning process .

Do you need to do strategic planning, but you've move

Operational Planning:

Operational planning ideally supports strategic planning efforts. Where strategic priorities are focused on a select few areas that need to be reviewed on an ongoing basis, operational plans can have more items ranging from a single to-do, to ongoing short, mid and long-term projects. While strategic plans often begin at the organizational level, operational plans zoom into individual departments and teams and can hone in on the day to day necessities of running the business.

Without a strong strategic direction, operational planning can be daunting. If your people don’t understand where the organization is headed, it can be difficult to decide which operational tasks and projects can propel the company into its ideal future state (i.e. your organization’s vision).

In short, operational planning can be done at the end of a strategic planning session, once the organizational priorities and goals are established – AND/OR - If the organization already has a strategic plan, operational planning can be done on an ongoing basis to remain aligned with the company’s strategic direction.

Operational plans ask questions such as:

  • What projects do we need to carry out to achieve our goals?
  • What daily tasks do we need to implement, continue, or stop in order to function?
  • Who is responsible for what (departmentally or individually)?
  • Does this task or action support the organization's mission, vision, and values (and is it aligned with the strategy)? 

When all team members are aware of the organization’s strategic direction and are aligned on where they are going, they will have a better understanding of how their daily tasks can move the organization forward. They will also be equipped to make decisions and model behaviors that support the organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Contact us for a consultation

Our readers' favourite posts

Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter: leaders digest, quick links.

  • Podcast (Spotify)
  • Speaker & Media
  • Alignment Book
  • Privacy Policy

Free Resources

  • Strategic planning session agenda (Sample)
  • Strategic plan template
  • How to create a strategic plan (Start here)
  • Weekly Strategy Tips
  • Non profit program

Products and Services

  • Strategic Planning Facilitator
  • Strategy Implementation Consulting
  • Strategic Planning Course
  • 1-855-895-5446

strategic planning_strategy_development_company_2023_award

Copyright © 2011-2023 SME Strategy Consulting | Strategic Planning Facilitator + Strategy Implementation Consulting. All rights reserved.

 alt=

The magazine of Glion Institute of Higher Education

  • Strategic planning vs business planning: how they’re both key to success

Strategic planning vs business planning how they're both key to success

Any thriving hospitality business needs thorough planning to make sure it succeeds. If you’ve heard the terms business planning and strategic planning, you might think they’re interchangeable, but they’re actually two distinct things companies need at different times for continued success.

The biggest difference is that business plans are mostly used when you are starting to build a business so you can quickly and smoothly create your vision. Strategic planning is what existing companies use to grow and improve their businesses.

If you’re looking for a career in hospitality management, it’s important to know the difference between the two and how to use them to best effect. In this article, we’ll go over what strategic planning and business planning are and how they are important to running a successful hospitality business.

We’ll also look at how you can learn to harness different planning methods and get the skills needed to develop your career.

Business planning

A business plan is one of the first things a fledgling business will draft. Alternatively, it can be used to set business goals when launching a new product or service.

The business plan will usually look at short-term details and focus on how things should run for around a year or less. This will include looking at concepts such as:

  • What the business idea is
  • Short-term goals
  • Who your customers are
  • What your customers need
  • What investment or financing you will need to start your business
  • How you make revenue
  • What profitability to expect
  • How you can appeal to potential shareholders
  • What the short-term operational needs of the business are
  • What the company’s values are
  • What the budget is for different parts of the business

This means market analysis and research are vital when you are making a business plan.

What are the objectives of business planning?

The primary objective of a business plan is to have all the main details of your business worked out before you start. This will give you a roadmap to use when you launch your business or when you start offering a different product or service.

For example, if you wanted to become an event planner   and open your own event planning business, your plan might include how to get funds to rent an office and pay staff.

Strategic planning

business operational and strategic plan

A strategic plan is where you set out the company’s goals and define the steps you will need to take to reach those goals.

A strategic plan would include:

  • What current capabilities the company has
  • Making measurable goals
  • A full strategy for business growth
  • How the company’s values, mission and vision tie in with the services and products the company intends to offer
  • Who in the organization will handle certain roles
  • What the timeline is for reaching certain goals
  • A SWOT analysis, looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the company
  • Examining the external environment for factors that will affect your company using a PEST (political, economic, social and technological) analysis

A strategic plan can be a long-term blueprint. You might find you use basically the same strategic plan for several years.

What is the objective and strategy of planning?

The aim of a strategic plan is to provide a tool that allows you to improve your business, grow the company, streamline processes or make other changes for the health of your business. Strategy implementation and meeting strategic objectives should generally lead to growth.

What is the difference between business planning and strategic planning?

There are a few major differences between strategic planning and business planning, which are outlined below.

Scope and time frame

A strategic plan is usually long-term, typically covering at least two to five years. By contrast, a business plan usually covers a year or less, since this is roughly how long it usually takes for a business to become established.

A business plan focuses on starting a business in its early stages. A strategic plan is used to guide the company through later stages. Put simply, the business plan is about direction and vision, while the strategic plan focuses on operations and specific tactics for business growth.

Stakeholders

A strategic plan will be presented to stakeholders and employees to make sure everyone knows what is going on in the company. This will help reassure everyone with a stake or role in the business.

By comparison, a business plan will often be shown to investors or lenders to help show the business idea is worth funding.

Flexibility and adaptability

A strategic plan typically has more flexibility. This is because it is meant to be in place for a longer period of time and the company should already be established. There is more leeway for refining strategy evolution, while your business plan should remain stable.

Similarities between business planning and strategic planning

Both of these activities will require some of the same analytical components, such as market analysis, financial projections and setting objectives you can track. Of course, both also require you to be highly organized and focused to ensure your business model or strategy development is appropriate for your business.

When to use strategic planning vs business planning

business operational and strategic plan

As we’ve already mentioned, you’ll generally use a business plan when you’re setting up a business or moving in a new direction. This will dictate much of the day-to-day running of a business. You would use strategic planning when you want to work on growth and drive innovation.

Can a business plan be used for strategic planning?

No, a business plan and a strategic plan are two different concepts with specific goals. While a business plan outlines short or mid-term goals and steps to achieve them, a strategic plan focuses on a company’s mid to long-term mission and how to accomplish this.

If you want to prepare for success, you need to make sure you are using the right type of plan.

Integrating strategic planning and business planning

While the two plans are different, you may end up using them together to ensure optimal success. As with any type of management role, such as hotel management , strategic and business plan management requires effective communication between different departments.

This includes different strategy managers as well as strategic and operational teams. You also need to make sure that, when you are using either plan, you find the right balance between flexibility and strict adherence to the plan. With strategic planning, this means constant strategy evaluation to assess your tactics and success.

Can strategic planning and business planning be used simultaneously?

In many hospitality careers ,  you’ll want to juggle growth and new directions, so you could end up using both planning types. However, it’s most common for the two to be distinct. This is because you’ll generally be using a business plan only when you are starting a new venture.

What are the career prospects in strategic and business planning?

There are plenty of options for what you can do if you have skills in strategic planning and business planning. Almost every management role will require these planning skills, including how to write strategic planning documents and measure success.

If you want to work in the hospitality sector, you could look into hotel planning and other careers with a business management degree . These will enable you to grow and nurture a business, but there is also a lot of scope to start your own business. Great planning skills can give you a real competitive advantage.

World-class degrees for making your mark in business

If you want the skills and insider knowledge to guide a business from inception to expansion, our courses provide expert teaching and real-world experience.

business operational and strategic plan

What skills do I need for a career in planning?

If you want to work in planning and management, you should work on various skills, such as:

  • Decision-making
  • Analytical skills
  • Risk assessment knowledge
  • Market analysis and forecasting
  • Team management
  • Communication, both written and verbal
  • Organization

What qualifications can help with a career in strategic planning or business planning?

If you want to work in hotel planning and management, the most common route is to get a hospitality degree from a well-respected hospitality school in Switzerland . This will help you get the skills and knowledge you need to properly plan businesses as well as handle the execution of these plans.

Business degrees also teach you many transferable skills, such as good communication with your strategy team or data analysis, that you can use in almost any role in hospitality. They can also reduce the need to work your way up through the hospitality industry.

How can hospitality school help with planning careers?

Attending hospitality school can help you learn skills dedicated to hospitality as well as more general management, business and planning skills. This includes everything from how to handle a team to specifics such as hotel revenue management strategies .

If you find a hospitality school offering professional hospitality internships , you’ll also get experience in managing hotels and hospitality venues, helping you leap ahead in your career.

Hospitality degrees to kickstart your career

Our international business course combines leading industry expertise with essential internships to provide an exceptional foundation for a thriving career in the hospitality industry.

business operational and strategic plan

Both strategic and business planning are vital to build and grow a business. While business planning focuses on setting up the business and handling investment, vision and overall goals, strategic planning concentrates on growing the business and processing operational efficiency and resource allocation on a longer-term basis.

If you want to learn how to develop a hotel business plan  or manage a hospitality venue, one of the best ways to get started is to study for a hospitality degree. This will give you hands-on experience of the strategic planning process or business management as well as the skills you need to succeed.

Photo credits Main image: Westend61/Westend61via Getty Images

business operational and strategic plan

GLION SPIRIT

business operational and strategic plan

BUSINESS OF LUXURY

business operational and strategic plan

LISTENING TO LEADERS

business operational and strategic plan

HOSPITALITY UNCOVERED

business operational and strategic plan

Featured Priority 4

business operational and strategic plan

Featured Priority 3

business operational and strategic plan

LEADERSHIP INSIGHTS

business operational and strategic plan

WELCOME TO GLION.

This site uses cookies. Some are used for statistical purposes and others are set up by third party services. By clicking ‘Accept all’, you accept the use of cookies

Privacy Overview

  • Get in Touch 1-800-589-4733

The Difference Between Business, Operational & Strategic Planning

Posted by Kristin Arnold on December 28, 2012

As a professional meeting facilitator who specializes in business, operational and strategic planning , I think it is only fitting that Joe and I conduct an off-site to do our planning.  Because of the size, scope and complexity of our business, two days should do it.  When done, then we’ll celebrate our new plans and then go to the beach.  (Believe it or not, Honolulu was the cheapest place to fly to on short notice as we both needed just a few more miles to make it to USAirways Chairman and Air Canada Super Elite status.  What a lovely place to conduct an off-site !).

First, we take a look at the Business Plan – the source document that describes the business that we are in.  I call it the “business basics” that should be reviewed and updated every year.  The key elements are:

  • The Business  including a general description of the business, the history, mission, vision and values
  • Products/Services including the relative importance and benefits of each product/service line, the life cycle, evaluation (performance, timeliness, ease of use, certainty), competitive comparison and differentiation from other products/services.
  • The Market including demographics on your current and targeted customers, your market segmentation, market research and trends, pricing strategies and marketing/sales strategy
  • Competitive Analysis including your nearest direct and indirect competitors
  • Physical Location of Business including building/space needs
  • Management including an organizational chart with key individuals and responsibilities, resumes, strengths and weaknesses. planned staff additions, other resources needed, payroll expenses
  • Personnel including Current personnel staffing and needs, future skills required, hiring and training plans, labor pool availability
  • Potential Risks and Problems including legal/regulatory issues
  • Financial Statements and Projections

The Operational Plan is an extension of the business plan, basically answering the questions: What are we going to do this year and how are we going to do it?  The resulting key activities then get folded into the annual budget.  I call this “blocking and tackling” – taking what you know to be true about your business this year and then making a plan that takes the business “to the next level.”  Typically, these plans forecast incremental improvement in the coming year.

The Strategic Plan , on the other hand, looks beyond the one-year horizon and extends your vision out three to five years (some extend even further out, but they have fairly robust strategic planning processes.  Most organizations I work with are keeping to the 3-5 year timespan).

Typically, there is a review of the business basics (some call this an internal scan) as well as an environmental scan – what’s happening in the outside world that could affect the business.  We then move into “Strategic Thinking” where we identify where we want to be in the next 3-5 years. It’s a position to be attained (your “vision” of the future) and you aren’t there yet!  Which means there is a GAP between where you are and where you want to be.  The Strategic Plan is created to close that GAP.  It also makes the assumption that you will continue to do what you have been doing through your business and operational plans (I call this “keeping the trains running”).  You may opt to stop doing some things, change the way your doing some things and even start doing some new things in order to support the strategic direction of the business.

Rather than think this year to the next, strategic thinking requires you to think long term and then ask, “What do we need to do in order to be successful in that preferred future?”  The strategic plan is about breakthrough improvements – figuring out where you want to be – and then determining the strategy to be successful in the long run.  These key initiatives and activities are then folded into the long term and operational budgets.

I have been in business for 20 years now – and I plan on staying in business for 20 more.  It would be absolutely ridiculous for me to think that I can keep on doing the same things and stay successful.  Actually, that’s a “go-out-of-business” strategy!  So I’ll invest a few days to work “on” vs. “in” the business and review and update my plans….and then go sit on the beach and celebrate the new year!

Happy new year to you!

Related Articles:

  • Stretch Your Leadership Teams’ Ability To Think Strategically
  • Wikipedia’s Definition of Strategic Planning

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Contact Kristin about your Meeting Facilitation & Design, Interactive Speeches, or Facilitation Training Needs.

call

800-589-4733

  • Your Name *
  • Company Name
  • Phone Number *
  • Name This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Connect with Kristin!

COPYRIGHT © 2024 ·Quality Process Consultants, Inc. · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

business operational and strategic plan

Complete Guide to Sales and Operations Planning

business operational and strategic plan

Are you overwhelmed by inaccurate forecasting, inventory surplus, and fragmented team communication? You’re not alone. This is where the importance of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) becomes evident.

This guide will walk sales teams through the details of S&OP. We will cover best practices, S&OP maturity tips, success metrics, common challenges, and misconceptions.

  • What is Sales and Operations Planning?

3 Components of S&OP

Why a well-executed s&op matters for every business, top benefits of s&op, s&op maturity, s&op process, s&op tips and best practices, debunking misconceptions about s&op, common s&op problems and how to overcome them, measuring the success of s&op, what is sales and operations planning.

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a cross-department process that helps ensure companies have the right amount of products to satisfy customers without extra stock piling up. S&OP’s intention: to align sales operations with long-term goals.

Here’s how it breaks down:

  • Sales planning process: Teams typically use a sales analytics platform to thoroughly analyze past sales, industry trends, and marketing plans to forecast future product sales.
  • Operations planning process: Ensure resources, such as raw materials and manufacturing capacity, are available to meet projected customer demand.
  • Meeting and balancing: Different departments collaborate to solve associated issues, like adjusting warehouse capacity or developing risk management strategies for supply chain disruptions. 90% of McKinsey survey respondents say they want to increase resilience further, and almost three-quarters expect to increase the budget allocated to resilience-related actions.
  • Action plan: Finalize and implement a detailed production plan.

S&OP has evolved to be more than just an integrated business planning process. It’s a way of life for mature organizations – a culture essential for adapting quickly to market changes. By including Sales and Operations Execution (S&OE), S&OP can tackle short-term challenges and keep sight of long-term goals, making it a comprehensive business strategy.

S&OP’s success hinges on people, technology, and process. The people must collaborate. The technology, including ERP and AI, ensures forecast accuracy. The process is a structured, systematic approach from data collection to action. Each component contributes to better decision-making.

People from across departments, including sales, finance, operations, and supply chain, are necessary for S&OP to function. This cross-functional team brings different views and skills. For S&OP success, you must have committed leadership, clear roles, and a culture of collaboration and trust.

To highlight the evolving nature of S&OP as part of the job: 70% of sales professionals now say S&OP is a key part of their job responsibilities. This shift indicates the growing recognition of S&OP’s value beyond traditional operational roles and its significance in planning and execution.

S&OP roles include:

  • Executive leader
  • Sales leader
  • Marketing leader
  • Demand planner
  • Operational leader
  • Supply chain leader

S&OP software and technology support tasks like real-time data analysis, forecasting, and planning for uncertainty. This includes enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which combine various business activities into one system, and AI-powered dashboards to help predict future trends.

The process guides S&OP from start to finish. It includes everything from data gathering and analysis to strategy and implementation. The process should adapt to changes yet provide stability.

A well-executed S&OP process helps navigate business complexities. It is the frontline defense against challenges, from excess inventory to missed sales opportunities. Integrating S&OE with S&OP helps balance short-term tactics with long-term goals, ultimately contributing to enhanced sales productivity .

Michael Youssef, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, emphasizes the importance of S&OP , stating, “S&OP is the single most important and critical cross-functional process. If S&OP is done properly, it leads to significant returns, including increased revenue and profitability.” This highlights the importance of integrated S&OP.

Without an S&OP process, businesses face a range of disruptions, from minor inconveniences to significant failures. These disruptions can manifest as excess inventory, resource bottlenecks, missed sales opportunities due to misaligned production and demand, siloed decision-making, or an inability to adapt, resulting in lost competitive edge and potential revenue.

Ultimately, S&OP is more than just a planning process; it’s a business management tool that helps prevent excess operational costs and hits to revenue and profitability. This significance is further echoed by current trends in digitization efforts , which now prioritize capturing the demand signal as the next challenge in supply chain management. According to recent McKinsey surveys, the top two priorities for digital investments are demand and supply planning, cited by 74% and 69% of respondents, respectively. This shift towards digitization underscores the critical role of S&OP in adapting to and anticipating market demands.

High-quality S&OP is evident in a company’s performance and culture. If a company is experiencing growth and employees and customers are satisfied, it’s a strong indicator of a healthy and mature S&OP process.

The primary benefits of S&OP include:

1. Informed Decision-Making

S&OP helps businesses make informed product demand and supply decisions. This will help balance inventory with market needs. For example, a retailer might adjust orders based on seasonal forecasts to avoid too much stock.

2. Streamlined Processes

S&OP reduces waste and speeds up production and sales cycles by making operations more efficient. A manufacturer might streamline its assembly line to meet increased demand and ensure on-time delivery every holiday season.

3. Transparency and Cross-Functional Collaboration

S&OP enhances departmental communication, leading to unified goals. For instance, marketing and production teams might collaborate on product launches to ensure availability aligns with promotional activities.

4. Better Sales and Budget Forecasting

Accurate sales predictions and financial planning help companies prepare for future growth. A company might use S&OP to adjust its budget forecast and working capital based on an anticipated increase in demand.

5. Enhanced Inventory Management

A well-planned S&OP helps businesses adjust inventory levels to minimize the risk of production surpluses or shortages, especially when anticipating a new product release.

6. Improve Product Lifecycle Management Process

S&OP equips teams with insights for important product launches and end-of-life management decisions. For example, a tech provider might use S&OP to plan the phase-out of an older version to ensure a smooth transition and market relevance.

7. Improve Customer Service

By meeting aggregate demand, S&OP leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. A retailer might use S&OP insights to ensure popular items are always in stock.

8. Profitability

Optimizing sales and reducing manufacturing and delivery costs boosts the bottom line. A company might identify cost-saving opportunities in its supply chain, increasing its profit margins.

The path to S&OP maturity progresses through stages, from basic and disjointed to more refined planning processes. Tactical companies react with little coordination. Over time, they adopt formal processes, improve collaboration, and define roles. Ultimately, strategic businesses plan and respond with agility.

A recent Gartner survey sheds light on a significant challenge in this progression: 27% of respondents indicate their S&OP time horizon is less than 12 months, and 62% have a planning horizon of less than 18 months. This prevalent focus on short-term planning drives tactical plans rather than strategic discussions and decisions during S&OP meetings, limiting the ability to anticipate and prepare for future needs. Decisions like expanding warehouse capacity or negotiating contract volumes with suppliers require long-term foresight well beyond a 12-month horizon. Companies need to mature past the all-too-common short-term planning to grow and compete.

How to Mature Your Sales and Operations Planning

Mature S&OP is important for companies in industries with complex supply chains, changing demand, and intense competition. To improve your S&OP process, consider these suggestions. They will help guide you from basic to advanced process stages.

  • Improve communication: It’s natural for departments to work in silos, focusing on their own immediate needs. Begin by improving how departments talk to each other and start seeking tools that automate simple tasks.
  • Collaborate: Once you start talking, work on cross-department planning together. Use tools that let everyone share information easily.
  • Integrate plans: When sales and operations start working together, use tools that help combine your plans. Set goals that everyone understands and can work towards.
  • Connect everything: Planning should include everyone, even your suppliers. Share market trends and predictive analytics in real time for better forecasting and resource allocation.
  • Incorporate more advanced technology: Finally, use advanced technology like AI to make your planning process data-driven and focused on the future. This helps the organization supplement or replace reactive measures with long-term ahead of the curve planning.

The aim is a fully integrated S&OP, using data and technology to make smart decisions. Maturation takes organizations from reacting to immediate problems to planning for the future.

In certain cases, it’s okay to maintain a more reactive and less mature S&OP stance. For small businesses, startups, or companies in stable markets with simple products, the need for a sophisticated S&OP process may not be urgent. These organizations benefit from flexibility and the ability to quickly respond to challenges without the overhead of complex planning. However, it’s important to recognize the signs of growth or market changes that necessitate a shift toward a more mature S&OP.

Sales and Operations Planning Process

The S&OP process guides supply chain leaders in balancing supply with customers’ wants. It helps them adjust S&OE, maintain appropriate stock, launch new products, phase out old ones, make smart investments, and hit goals.

Let’s take a look at the steps in the S&OP process:

Product Data Gathering

This initial stage involves collecting and analyzing data. Research and development (R&D), product development, and marketing teams examine market trends, product performance, and upcoming product launches to predict future sales. This phase sets the groundwork for aligning product planning with market expectations.

Demand Planning

Demand planning predicts expected demand with inputs from marketing, sales, and external trends. This forecast aims to create a consensus on future demand. It factors historical data, market trends, and predictive models.

Production and Supply Planning

A supply plan is created in sync with the agreed-upon demand forecast. The aim is to align distribution, manufacturing, and procurement operations to fulfill demand predictions. This involves planning for the unknowns, including capacity constraints and demand variations.

Pre-S&OP Meeting (Plan Reconciliation)

Pre-S&OP meetings align product, demand, supply, and finance plans. These meetings aim to identify and strategize around any significant gaps or discrepancies in the plans. This shared review ensures that all departments are aligned and prepared for the executive S&OP meeting.

Executive Meeting

The executive S&OP meeting is the culmination of the S&OP process, where senior leaders review all proposals. This stage focuses on decision-making, with “what-if” scenarios and risk assessments guiding the discussions. Execs resolve remaining issues and ensure the business’s objectives are met.

The output of the executive meeting is the approved demand and supply plan for implementation.

Implementation

Following executive team approval, the strategic plans are put into action. This involves coordinating across departments and continuously monitoring KPIs.

Navigating S&OP requires coordination across business units, each with unique challenges and inputs. The following best practices act as a guide to coordinate efforts and reduce friction.

1. Foster a Culture that Supports S&OP

Embed S&OP as a core element of your business, driven by leadership and embraced by all employees. It’s instrumental to financial success. For S&OP to thrive, a culture rooted in clear communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement is crucial. Regular meetings, shared tools , and documentation should be standard practice.

2. Refine the Sales and Operations Execution Process

Continuously improve the S&OP process by analyzing outcomes, soliciting feedback, and implementing changes when needed. This could mean streamlining data collection methods or adopting new tools to integrate sales forecasts with production and inventory planning.

3. Roll-out Cross Department Training

Implement comprehensive training programs that promote understanding of the S&OP process across departments. Your training platform could include workshops on data analysis, forecasting techniques, and how different roles contribute to the S&OP process, ensuring everyone understands how their actions impact overall business performance.

4. Include All Internal Stakeholders

S&OP breaks down organizational silos. By connecting the expertise of sales, finance, marketing, supply chain, procurement, and production, S&OP becomes a powerful tool for focusing the entire business on common goals.

5. Ensure Sales and Operations Alignment With Business Strategy

Business goals trump departmental goals. To maintain alignment, regularly reassess and fine-tune sales and operations plans. Organizing quarterly alignment sessions can ensure that sales forecasts and production capacity are matched with the business’s long-term objectives. These sessions facilitate review and adjustment as standard practice.

6. Assign Ownership

Designate a champion with a thorough understanding of the business. They should have a broad view of sales, operations, finance, and supply chain to oversee S&OP’s continuity. Typically, a Director of Operations, COO, or a specialized S&OP Manager is well-suited for this role.

7. Maintain Records

Ensure data is always current, and monitor metrics and KPIs weekly to identify any adverse trends that require corrective actions. It’s crucial to keep thorough records of all S&OP meetings, decisions, and outcomes. These records should be available to inform future planning, performance, and accountability.

8. Get Executive Buy-In

Secure support from senior leadership. Executive support helps with access to resources, authority, and visibility. It also ensures that S&OP aligns with the company’s goals.

S&OP is often shrouded in myths that deter companies. The opportunity to dispel these myths is possible when a company understands the true intention and values of S&OP. Let’s clear up some of the most common misconceptions:

S&OP is Unnecessary

Many view S&OP as an optional extra rather than a necessity. S&OP ensures that all departments move in the same direction, aligning a company’s goals with its operational capacity.

S&OP is Just a Review of Historical Data

S&OP does involve looking at past performance, but it’s far more than a historical review. It uses historical data to predict future demand and supply needs. This helps anticipate market changes, adjust sales strategies , and stay ahead of competitors.

Short-Term Focus

This misconception stems from a focus on immediate issues rather than long-term strategic planning. Short-term is not the intention of S&OP.

Despite S&OP’s importance, many companies still focus on short-term S&OP planning. This can limit the ability to make decisions that require longer lead times, such as new product development and launch. By embracing a longer-term approach, businesses can leverage S&OP for more than immediate operational needs, using it to shape decisions that ensure long-term success and sustainability.

S&OP is Difficult to Manage

Though S&OP might seem daunting due to its cross-function and the need for detailed planning, it’s far from unmanageable. The secret lies in the right team, tools, and leadership commitment. Reduce the complexity with communication, structured processes, and regular review cycles.

Admittedly, S&OP is not without challenges. It is more complex than many other business processes. However, understanding these challenges helps overcome them. Here are two common issues and best practices to address them:

  • Overcoming time constraints: The S&OP process can be incredibly time-intensive, often at the expense of other duties. This often stems from insufficient, inaccurate, or unavailable data and process problems. To mitigate this, automate data collection wherever possible. Don’t overwhelm the team with endless KPIs and metrics. Simplify the process by focusing on those that genuinely impact business outcomes. Regularly reassess the process to identify and remove redundant steps.
  • Bridging the departmental divide: S&OP involves many people from different departments, sometimes leading to tension from conflicting goals or misunderstandings. To tackle this, work on a collaborative culture that respects differences. Implement cross-functional training programs to help departments understand each other’s duties and challenges. Use neutral facilitators to help mediate meetings and ensure all perspectives are considered and valued.

Monitoring and measuring are fundamental to any process, including S&OP. Without metrics, there’s no clear way to identify improvement areas or justify investing in the process. Here’s how you can measure the impact and success of your S&OP efforts:

  • Customer satisfaction: Use surveys and feedback tools to gauge customer satisfaction levels before and after implementing S&OP. An increase in satisfaction indicates better alignment of product availability with customer demand.
  • Inventory costs: Monitor inventory levels and related costs, such as storage and obsolescence. A successful S&OP process should optimize inventory levels and reduce excess stock and associated costs.
  • Sales: Track sales performance and productivity closely. An S&OP process should result in fewer stockouts, driving sales upwards .
  • Operations and business goal alignment: Regularly review how operational activities and outcomes stack up against the entire organization’s strategic objectives. S&OP success means operations are aligned with the long-term vision and goals of the business, leading to more cohesive and strategic decision-making.

S&OP Made Easy with Highspot

Diving into S&OP doesn’t have to be daunting. It’s all about teamwork, staying proactive, and always aiming for better ways to do things. The use of digital technologies is essential to robust supply chain planning.

Highspot offers the right mix of tools, insights, and training. This ensures your sales team is perfectly engaged with what your business can do and where it aims to go, boosting customer happiness, streamlining operations, and making your operations more resilient.

Let Highspot show you how to make all the pieces fit. Request a demo today .

The Highspot Team works to create and promote the Highspot sales enablement platform, which gives businesses a powerful sales advantage to engage in more relevant buyer conversations and achieve their revenue goals. Through AI-powered search, analytics, in-context training, guided selling, and 50+ integrations, the Highspot platform delivers enterprise-ready sales enablement in a modern design that sales reps and marketers love.

Highspot Team

Industry-Leading Enablement for Every Business

  • Why You Need a Sales Enablement Platform
  • What Customers Say
  • Why Choose Highspot
  • Calculate Your ROI
  • Guiding Principles
  • Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Settings
  • Trust Center
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Sales Content Management
  • Sales Plays and Playbooks
  • Buyer Engagement
  • Sales Training
  • Sales Coaching
  • Integrations
  • Sales Enablement
  • Partner Enablement
  • Financial Services
  • Manufacturing
  • Life Sciences
  • Ebooks, Guides, and More
  • Highspot in Action Videos
  • Strategic Enablement Framework
  • Definitive Guide
  • Success Stories
  • Events and Webinars
  • Spark Community
  • Highspot Marketplace
  • United States (English)
  • Canada (English)
  • Deutschland (Deutsch)
  • France (Français)
  • United Kingdom (English)
  • Australia (English)

Copyright © 2024 Highspot

The Strategy Story

Wells Fargo SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Before we dive deep into the SWOT analysis, let’s get the business overview of Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo & Company is a multinational financial services company with significant global operations, serving over 70 million customers across 35 countries.

As one of the “Big Four Banks” in the United States, alongside JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, Wells Fargo holds a prominent position in the financial industry. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It operates through its primary subsidiary, Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., a national bank with its main office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The company’s vast array of services includes banking, investment, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance products, distributed through various segments such as Consumer Banking and Lending, Commercial Banking, Corporate and Investment Banking, and Wealth and Investment Management.

Wells Fargo is recognized for its extensive network, comprising 8,050 branches and 13,000 automated teller machines, and 2,000 standalone mortgage branches. It is notable for being the second-largest retail mortgage originator in the U.S., originating one out of every four home loans and managing a $1.8 trillion home mortgage servicing portfolio.

Internationally, Wells Fargo maintains offices in major cities such as London, Dublin, Paris, Dubai, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Toronto, with significant back-office operations in India and the Philippines employing over 20,000 staff. The company’s history dates back to 1852, when it was founded by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo to provide express and banking services to California during the Gold Rush era. Wells Fargo’s current form resulted from a merger with Minneapolis-based Norwest Corporation in 1998, which expanded its reach to become a coast-to-coast bank, further solidified by the acquisition of Wachovia in 2008.

Financial Performance 2023 : Wells Fargo generated a revenue of $82.6 billion and a net income of $19.1 billion.

Here is the SWOT analysis for Wells Fargo

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a business, project, or individual. It involves identifying the internal and external factors that can affect a venture’s success or failure and analyzing them to develop a strategic plan. In this article, we do a SWOT Analysis of Wells Fargo.

SWOT Analysis: Meaning, Importance, and Examples

  • Global Operations : Wells Fargo has significantly expanded its reach beyond the United States, operating in over 35 countries and serving more than 75 million customers globally, which enhances its strength as an international bank​​.
  • Inclusion Among the Big Four : Wells Fargo is one of the “Big Four” banks in the United States, holding a substantial portion of the country’s deposits and significantly influencing policymaking. This positioning gives Wells Fargo a competitive edge and a strong influence in the financial industry​​​​.
  • Leadership in the Middle Market Segment : Wells Fargo has established itself as the leading bank for middle market companies in the U.S., enjoying the financial benefits of serving this vital segment of the economy​​.
  • Brand Value : The bank is recognized for its precious global banking brand, ranking 8th in the Brand Finance 2022 report with a brand value of  $30.1 billion . This reflects the bank’s strong reputation and the trust it has built over the years​​.
  • Diverse Services : Wells Fargo offers services tailored to different market segments, including consumer banking and lending, commercial banking, corporate and investment banking, and wealth and investment management. This diversity allows Wells Fargo to cater to a broad customer base and generate multiple revenue streams​​.
  • Strong Financial Performance : The bank has consistently shown robust financial performance, which enables it to invest in technology, infrastructure, and customer service, maintaining its competitive position​​.
  • Commitment to Sustainability and Social Responsibility : Wells Fargo has been recognized for its environment-friendly policies, providing over $10 billion to environmentally beneficial businesses and actively participating in efforts to mitigate carbon emissions​​.
  • Reputational Challenges : Wells Fargo has faced significant reputational damage due to various scandals, including creating millions of unauthorized accounts by employees to meet sales targets. This has eroded customer trust and attracted negative publicity and regulatory scrutiny​​​​.
  • Technological Limitations : The bank has struggled to update its antiquated banking systems, leading to increased operational breakdowns and customer inconvenience. This has made it difficult for Wells Fargo to satisfy regulatory requirements and remain competitive in a rapidly evolving digital banking landscape​​​​.
  • High Operational Costs : Wells Fargo has incurred high operational costs due to fines from lawsuits and the maintenance of outdated machinery. These costs have undermined profitability and challenged the bank’s long-term sustainability​​​​.
  • Limited International Presence : Compared to some of its competitors, Wells Fargo has a relatively limited international presence, which could restrict its growth opportunities and increase its exposure to domestic market fluctuations​​.
  • Overreliance on Traditional Banking : The bank’s heavy reliance on traditional banking services, such as lending and deposits, may hinder its ability to quickly adapt to changing customer preferences and the rise of fintech innovations​​.
  • Regulatory Limitations : Following the scandal involving unauthorized accounts, the Federal Reserve imposed a cap on the bank’s asset growth, limiting its ability to issue new loans and expand its business operations​​.

Opportunities

  • Digital Transformation : The rise of digital banking presents an opportunity for Wells Fargo to upgrade its technological capabilities and introduce innovative digital products and services. By investing in digital transformation, the bank can improve the customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and maintain competitiveness in the evolving financial landscape​​.
  • Expansion into New Markets : Wells Fargo can explore opportunities for expansion into new geographic markets, both domestically and internationally. Diversifying its presence can help the bank tap into new customer segments and reduce its dependence on the U.S. market​​.
  • Investment Banking Expansion : Wells Fargo plans to grow its corporate and investment banking business, seeing a $1 billion opportunity to offer more investment banking, advisory, and underwriting services to its existing customer base. This expansion into Wall Street activities represents a significant opportunity for growth​​.
  • Strengthening Commercial & Industrial Lending : Despite being a leader in SME lending, Wells Fargo has the potential to regain its leadership in commercial and industrial (C&I) lending. Strengthening its position in this segment can open up new revenue streams and enhance its market share​​.
  • Digital Infrastructure Strategy : The bank’s partnership with major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to adopt multi-cloud technologies can accelerate its digital transformation. This shift can lead to improved product offerings, enhanced customer experience, and increased employee collaboration​​.
  • Diversification of Portfolio : The volatile nature of the banking sector makes diversification a prudent strategy. Wells Fargo can diversify its portfolio by venturing into more stable and growing industries to balance out the risks associated with the banking sector​​.
  • Focusing on Smaller Towns : After establishing a strong presence in major cities worldwide, Wells Fargo has an opportunity to expand its services to smaller towns, potentially tapping into untapped markets and customer bases​​.
  • Expanding Operations in Emerging Economies : With most of its assets in the U.S., Wells Fargo can expand its operations in emerging economies such as Africa and Asia, exploiting growth opportunities in these regions​​.
  • Intense Competition : The banking sector is highly competitive, with numerous traditional banks, financial institutions, and emerging fintech companies offering similar products and services. This fierce competition can erode Wells Fargo’s market share, exert pressure on pricing, and challenge its growth​​​​.
  • Regulatory Environment : The financial industry is subject to stringent regulations and oversight, which can change and become more complex. Wells Fargo operates in a complex regulatory environment, and any changes in laws or compliance requirements can significantly impact the company’s operations, profitability, and ability to grow​​.
  • Economic Downturns : Wells Fargo’s performance is closely tied to the economy’s overall health. Economic downturns can lead to increased loan defaults, reduced demand for financial services, and decreased profitability. Economic uncertainties and market volatility threaten the company’s financial stability​​.
  • Global Recession : A severe global recession, evidenced by job losses and economic downturns in many countries, can adversely affect Wells Fargo. Customers defaulting on loans and mortgages during such times can lead to significant financial losses for the bank​​.
  • Public Perception and Trust : Regaining public trust after scandals is challenging. Negative public perception, mainly if fueled by ongoing investigations or new allegations, can lead to customer attrition and impact Wells Fargo’s ability to attract new business​​.
  • Pandemic-Related Impacts : The stability and success of the banking sector rely heavily on the broader economy. Wells Fargo’s profits were significantly affected by the pandemic, which led to job losses and the collapse of small businesses, resulting in the accumulation of unpaid loans​​.
  • Loan Caps Imposed by Regulators : Following the fake account scandal, the Federal Reserve imposed a cap on Wells Fargo’s asset growth, limiting its ability to issue new loans and expand its business operations. This restriction is a significant threat to the bank’s growth prospects​​.
  • Technological Disruptions : The rapid pace of technological innovation in the financial sector, particularly by fintech companies, threatens traditional banks like Wells Fargo. Staying competitive requires continuous investment in technology, which can be challenging given the bank’s other priorities and constraints.

Check out the SWOT Analysis of Global Businesses

Related posts.

business operational and strategic plan

Superdry SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Tommy Hilfiger SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Universal Studios SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Pinterest SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Lindt SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Tripadvisor SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

United Airlines SWOT Analysis

business operational and strategic plan

Vivo SWOT Analysis

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

News-Herald

Local News | Painesville City Council considers new…

Share this:.

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Share via SMS (Opens in new window)
  • Lake County
  • Geauga County
  • Cuyahoga County
  • Opioid Epidemic

Local News | Painesville City Council considers new strategic plan

The city of Painesville.

Painesville City Council is working to create a new strategic plan that will lay out its goals and mission for the coming years.

Council discussed an early form of the plan at the start of February. That version of the plan set goals in areas ranging from revenue growth to quality of life.

Council President Jim Fodor described the proposed document as “a multi-year plan.”

“It’s just reinforcing good things that we’re currently doing and also help to identify those areas where maybe some professional development or some additional input needs to come to move us along,” he said.

The draft plan’s first goal is economic prosperity. The city would aim to receive increased revenue from the growth of new and existing businesses, while city utilities would develop three-to-five-year plans for profitable operations.

The second goal would be to evaluate and improve the city’s roads and sidewalks, as well as its water, electric, stormwater and water pollution control departments.

The third goal would be to “create an organization that continually improves itself.” Proposals include working to provide professional development for department heads and starting an ambassador program for connecting council members to city residents. The document also mentions providing improved service to residents and businesses.

“Since we are in the service business, I think it’s important that we survey our customers to make sure we’re meeting their needs,” Fodor said.

The fourth goal would be to improve Painesville’s quality of life. Fodor said that this would include offering amenities that would make the city a “destination place that people are coming to to not only work but enjoy the quality of life as well.” This final goal would also include offering programming for seniors.

The document states that its mission is “to ensure and improve the quality of life and growth of our community,” while its four key values are listed as respect, resourcefulness, integrity and commitment.

Council members talked about starting work on a new strategic plan in March 2023. Fodor said that they worked on the plan during the summer before shifting focus to Painesville’s 2024 budget.

Council’s previous strategic plan ran from 2018-22 and is available on the city website .

More in Local News

Richmond Heights Recreation Department to host April casino bus trip

Local News | Richmond Heights Recreation Department to host April casino bus trip

Van Gorder Manor's chapter as Willoughby House, Julia's 1902 set to open in April

Restaurants Food and Drink | Van Gorder Manor’s chapter as Willoughby House, Julia’s 1902 set to open in April

Cooking with Kids brings families, food together in Chester Township

SUBSCRIBER ONLY

Local news | cooking with kids brings families, food together in chester township.

Lake County commissioners, LDA collaborate on Lake Erie College project

Local News | Lake County commissioners, LDA collaborate on Lake Erie College project

IMAGES

  1. Strategic Planning Cycle as a graphic illustration free image download

    business operational and strategic plan

  2. Strategic Planning vs Operational Planning: Difference and Comparison

    business operational and strategic plan

  3. Business Operational Plan

    business operational and strategic plan

  4. Differences between strategic and operational planning

    business operational and strategic plan

  5. Business Operational Plan

    business operational and strategic plan

  6. Organizational Planning in 3 levels Strategic, Tactical, Operational

    business operational and strategic plan

VIDEO

  1. strategic business unit

  2. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRATEGIC PLANNING AND OPERATIONAL PLANNING

  3. Process of strategic planning

  4. Operational Strategic Plan Overview Feb. 2024

  5. Brief introduction to Strategic Plan and Operational Plan

COMMENTS

  1. Strategic VS. Operational Planning: 7 Main Differences

    Simply put, your strategic plan shares your vision for the future, while your operational plan lays out how you'll get there on a daily to weekly basis. Both concepts describe your company's plans for the future, but in different contexts. Strategic & Operational Planning Examples Take Meta, for example (formerly Facebook).

  2. Strategic Planning Vs Operational Planning: What's The Difference?

    Operational planning outlines the execution of your strategic plan. It includes specific, short-term actions, projects, and initiatives that contribute to achieving strategic objectives. Annual operating plan diagram The responsibility for creating these operational plans rests with middle management and department heads.

  3. Business Plan Vs Strategic Plan Vs Operational Plan

    Business Plan Vs Strategic Plan Vs Operational Plan—Differences Explained Noah Parsons 5 min. read Updated October 27, 2023 Many business owners know and understand the value of a business plan. The business plan is a key component of the startup and fundraising process and serves as a foundation for your organization.

  4. Business Strategy and Operations: Definition, Types and Tips

    A business operational strategy is a decision-making process that shapes an organization's long-term plans to achieve the objectives in its mission statement. It comprises specific actions management wants to take to achieve a specific aspect of a company's operations.

  5. Operational vs. Strategic Planning: Definitions and Differences

    Operational planning is the process of making a detailed, short-term plan for your department's business operations. How far you plan out your operations depends on your business needs, but many managers decide to plan a year in advance.

  6. Learn how to do operational planning the right way

    A strategic plan is a business-level plan of your long-term strategy for the next three to five years. An operational plan is smaller in both scope and timeline. The goal of operational planning is to outline the daily actions you need to take to hit your strategic goals. Read: New to strategic planning? Start here.

  7. What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

    Strategic planning is a business process that helps you define and share the direction your company will take in the next three to five years. During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization's mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives.

  8. 7 Strategic Planning Models and 8 Frameworks To Start [2023] • Asana

    1. Basic model The basic strategic planning model is ideal for establishing your company's vision, mission, business objectives, and values. This model helps you outline the specific steps you need to take to reach your goals, monitor progress to keep everyone on target, and address issues as they arise.

  9. Strategic vs Operational Planning

    Strategic plans stay big-picture, and operational plans are specifically focused on implementation. As such, there are significant differences in how strategic and operational plans are designed: Specificity: Strategic plans must stay relatively vague, but operational plans can be highly specific.

  10. What is Operational Planning? Definition and FAQs

    Operational planning is the result of a team or department working to execute a strategic plan. It is a future-oriented process that maps out department goals, capabilities, and budgets to promote the success of team-based activities designed to support the strategic plan. Operational business plans are most effective when there is buy-in from ...

  11. Operational Planning: How to Make an Operations Plan

    Operational planning and strategic planning are complementary to each other. This is because strategic plans define the business strategy and the long-term goals for your organization, while operational plans define the steps required to achieve them. What Is a Strategic Plan?

  12. Difference between a Business vs Strategic Plan

    A strategic plan answers where an established organization is going in the future and how they intend to reach that future state. A strategic plan also focuses on building a sustainable competitive advantage and is futuristic. A business plan is used to assess the viability of a business opportunity and is more tactical.

  13. Business plan vs. Strategic plan vs. Operational plan (2023)

    A business plan outlines the "what" and "how" of your business, while a strategic plan sets the long-term vision. Operational plans dive into day-to-day tasks. We'll explain their roles, differences, and how they work together. In this post, we'll break down these concepts, explain the difference between them and why all three are ...

  14. How To Turn A Corporate Strategy Into An Operational Plan

    Strategies are long-term goals for the company, while plans pertain more to the short-term objectives the company needs to meet in order to achieve the strategic goal. Strategy speaks to the...

  15. Strategic and Operational Planning: What's the Difference?

    Strategic planning is the process for determining what a company wants to accomplish in the future, while operational planning is how it plans to achieve these goals. Operational planners focus on day-to-day tasks. While strategic planners pay attention to macro issues such as market trends and technological developments.

  16. 10+ Operational Planning Examples to Fulfill your Strategic Goals

    Operational planning, in essence, transforms the strategic objectives into actionable plans, ensuring that the entire team, from department heads to diverse cross-functional teams, is aligned and works in tandem to support revenue growth, increase productivity, and achieve the desired outcomes.

  17. Difference Between Strategic Planning and Operational Planning

    Strategic Planning is concentrated towards attaining the long-term objectives of business. On the other hand, operational planning is done to achieve short-term objectives of the company. These are used to set priorities and align the resources, in such a way that leads to the accomplishment of business goals.

  18. What is the Difference Between a Strategic Plan and an Operational Plan?

    A strong strategic plan serves as a roadmap to follow from where you are now, to where you want to be. An operational plan, however, focuses in on the micro, or the day-to-day, and weekly actions that can help your people achieve organizational goals. Therefore, strategy is working ON your business, while operations is working IN your business.

  19. Operations Strategy: 5 Key Elements of an Operations Strategy

    Business Operations Strategy: 5 Key Elements of an Operations Strategy Written by MasterClass Last updated: Dec 17, 2021 • 3 min read Learn how businesses use operations strategies to identify and implement cost-effective processes for creating and distributing products and services.

  20. Strategic planning vs business planning: how they're both key to

    Conclusion. Both strategic and business planning are vital to build and grow a business. While business planning focuses on setting up the business and handling investment, vision and overall goals, strategic planning concentrates on growing the business and processing operational efficiency and resource allocation on a longer-term basis.

  21. PDF How to write a strategic plan

    Overcoming Challenges and Pitfalls. Challenge of consensus over clarity. Challenge of who provides input versus who decides. Preparing a long, ambitious, 5 year plan that sits on a shelf. Finding a balance between process and a final product. Communicating and executing the plan. Lack of alignment between mission, action, and finances.

  22. Demystifying Strategic Planning: Process and Benefits

    Strategic planning aligns the organization with a common understanding of what they want to achieve and how they will get there with daily operations. It's taking a company's vision and breaking it into mid-term and long-term goals. In contrast to strategic planning, business planning focuses on short-term goals.

  23. The Difference Between Business, Operational & Strategic Planning

    As a professional meeting facilitator who specializes in business, operational and strategic planning, I think it is only fitting that Joe and I conduct an off-site to do our planning. Because of the size, scope and complexity of our business, two days should do it. When done, then we'll celebrate our new plans and then go to the beach.

  24. Strategic Plan vs. Business Plan: What's the Difference?

    A strategic plan is a business framework that existing companies implement when they want to improve their business processes and streamline their operations. The strategic plan helps companies focus their efforts on transitioning the organization into a new direction, one that will hopefully bring about positive and long-lasting results.

  25. Complete Guide to Sales and Operations Planning

    Operations and business goal alignment: Regularly review how operational activities and outcomes stack up against the entire organization's strategic objectives. S&OP success means operations are aligned with the long-term vision and goals of the business, leading to more cohesive and strategic decision-making.

  26. CEO Vision 2024: Crafting A Strategic Roadmap For Business And

    Successful alignment of technology investments with critical business strategies is the key. The value of technology and successful technology investments depends on organizations.

  27. Wells Fargo SWOT Analysis

    Financial Performance 2023: Wells Fargo generated a revenue of $82.6 billion and a net income of $19.1 billion.. Here is the SWOT analysis for Wells Fargo. A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a business, project, or individual.

  28. Painesville City Council considers new strategic plan

    Painesville City Council is working to create a new strategic plan that will lay out its goals and mission for the coming years. Council discussed an early form of the plan at the start of February.