What is Strategic Planning? An Overview | Atlassian

Key Takeaways

• Strategic planning is the process of defining a company's long-term direction and allocating resources to support an overarching vision.

• It acts as a compass for business decisions, ensuring every individual project contributes to the organization's primary goals.

• Collaborative planning sessions boost alignment by ensuring every employee understands the broader strategy and their role within it.

• Set aside time every quarter to review your progress and update your roadmap to reflect changing market conditions.

Take a step back to find your focus

Imagine that you and your team are starting a new quarter – or maybe an entirely new year. You’re eager to roll up your sleeves and accomplish something meaningful together.

First, you need to decide what to focus on. Business leaders play a crucial role in setting clear priorities and guiding the organization toward long-term goals.

The opportunity seems fun in theory, but it isn’t long before things take a turn for the worse. Everyone has a different idea about what should take priority, and they begin arguing for why their initiative should come first.

Debating priorities takes so much time that the team struggles to move forward. Strategic planning aligns your actions with the organization’s mission, so every initiative supports long-term goals. It provides clarity, direction, and adaptability so teams can focus on what matters most.

This is what happens when your company doesn’t have a strategic plan.

Strategic planning is essential for organizations to navigate complex environments and enhance overall performance.

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the process organizations use to define their direction, typically undertaken by company leaders. It helps align strategy with company goals, ensuring efforts support the organization’s vision and long-term objectives. It involves setting priorities and allocating resources to support that vision.

It’s easy to confuse strategic planning with project planning, but the two are quite different. Project planning focuses on the individual initiatives your team is completing (how you will move each project from inception to completion).

Strategic planning operates at a broader level. It pulls all individual projects into a cohesive strategy that supports the company’s overarching goal.

So, if your strategic plan included a vision statement that said your company aims to “be known as the most trusted experts in human resource management,” then every single project that your company completes should somehow relate to that vision. The vision statement defines the desired future state of the organization and serves as a guiding element throughout the planning cycle.

Think of strategic planning as the compass for all decisions the business and its leaders make. It sets the overall context, so you don’t get lost in the day-to-day details.

The strategic planning process typically involves several phases, including determining the current position, developing strategies, and managing performance.

Why is strategic planning worth your time?

1. Focus your efforts (and reduce your stress)

Does decision-making sometimes feel like throwing darts at a board? You’re not alone. A McKinsey survey found that only 20% of respondents say their organizations excel at decision-making.

A strategic plan will help. Knowing where the company is headed helps leaders make better decisions. Senior leadership plays a critical role in setting and communicating strategic goals, ensuring that teams are aligned and focused on organizational priorities.

Strategic planning also ensures projects have clear, measurable outcomes, which allows you to demonstrate how specific projects contribute to the overall plan. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help track progress and guide data-driven decisions.

Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals is essential in strategic planning to ensure clarity and accountability.

2. Improve your communication

Imagine the confusion that would occur in this scenario: you provided directions to help a coworker pull the quarterly financial statements. However, they thought they were learning how to log the check numbers for that month. 

That misunderstanding wastes time and effort. Sadly, this happens more often than not in the workplace. More than 80% of employees say that miscommunication happens at work very frequently, frequently, or occasionally. 

When employees understand the bigger picture (cough, cough, which they get when they review your strategic plan), the message gets clearer. They're already equipped with the context and background information they need to understand directions, provide instructions, and confidently move projects forward.

Understanding where your entire company is headed helps you make more thoughtful decisions that support your end goal.

3. Boost alignment

Here’s a scary statistic: up to 95% of a company’s workers admit that they are unaware of or don’t understand the company’s strategy. Yikes.

Employees don’t want to feel left in the dark or to have no clue how their day-to-day work influences the company’s growth. With a strategic plan, everyone on your team – from the C-suite to your brand new employees – knows what they’re working toward. Be sure to document your strategic plan and make it easily accessible so that anyone can refer back to it for clarification. Organizational culture plays a key role in supporting this alignment, reinforcing shared values and behaviors. It’s also important to ensure alignment across every organizational level, so that strategic goals and KPIs cascade from leadership down to each employee.

Another advantage of strategic planning: it’s typically a collaborative process. An open discussion means all parties are on the same page from the get-go. When individual efforts are clearly connected to strategic objectives, teams are more likely to stay aligned and motivated. Top management's commitment to communicating the strategic vision is essential to reducing resistance to change.

How to analyze the business environment you operate in

Before you set strategic goals, you need a clear view of the landscape you’re operating in. Analyzing the business environment helps you understand what’s working inside your organization — and what’s changing outside of it — so your plan is grounded in reality.

Look at internal factors such as core competencies, culture, resources, and operational capabilities, alongside external factors such as market trends, competitors, regulations, and emerging technologies. A simple SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) can help you connect the dots and spot where to invest, what to protect, and what risks to plan for.

This isn’t a one-and-done exercise. Revisit your environmental scan regularly (often quarterly, or more frequently in fast-changing industries) to keep priorities aligned and avoid making decisions based on outdated assumptions. Use a mix of quantitative data (growth rates, financial metrics) and qualitative insights (customer sentiment, cultural shifts, stakeholder expectations) for the most complete picture.

3 ways to ace your strategic plan

If you’re already a whiz at project planning, take comfort in the fact that strategic planning has a lot of similarities – just on a larger, company-focused scale. Strategic planning relies on a strategic framework and the use of strategic planning tools, such as SWOT analysis and balanced scorecards, to guide organizations through comprehensive analysis and effective decision-making.

A successful strategic plan should include an assessment of the current state, a SWOT analysis, and a clear roadmap for implementation.

However, there are a few activities unique to strategic planning that will help your leadership team pull together a plan that truly supports your vision. A typical strategic plan also includes a mission statement, vision, core values, long-term goals, and action plans.

1. SWOT analysis: Assess internal and external factors

A SWOT analysis involves identifying your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. As part of strategic planning, a situational analysis plays a key role by analyzing both internal and external factors that impact an organization's success. The simplest way to approach this is by using a two-by-two matrix to plot these different elements (grab a helpful template right here!).

List your product or company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the table above.

For example, maybe one of your strengths is that you use technology that none of your competitors use, and you have an opportunity to reach an even broader market. But one of your weaknesses is your lack of financial resources, and the threat is that more and more similar companies are entering the market. Environmental scans, including PEST analysis, are essential for understanding the operating environment and external environment, helping you assess political, economic, social, technological, ecological, and legal trends that may affect your business.

That’s all important information to have as you’re pulling together your plan, so that you can craft a strategy that considers each of them. Understanding the competitive environment and identifying strengths and weaknesses through situational analysis is crucial for making informed strategic decisions.

A SWOT analysis can be performed at any time – not just for your strategic plan, but also for new projects, features, and more. It’s a flexible framework. 

Who needs to be involved in a SWOT analysis? Well, that depends on what you’re planning. But when using it specifically for a strategic plan, your leadership team should definitely have a seat at the table.

2. Start, stop, continue

History is a great teacher. You can learn a lot from your past wins and disappointments. Data analytics can provide valuable insights for strategic planning by identifying patterns and trends that inform better decision-making.

Start, stop, continue is a retrospective technique in which your company looks back on recent experience and decides what needs to change in the future. You’ll gather a team to brainstorm activities in the following three categories:

• Start: Activities that haven’t been implemented yet but would have a positive impact on the organization.

• Stop: Activities that you’re currently doing but hurt the organization.

• Continue: Activities that have been tried and were successful but haven’t become routine yet.

Give everybody some time to generate as many ideas as possible for each bucket. Then, as a team, discuss and group similar ideas together, and decide which are the most pressing.

Use a free start, stop, continue template

This framework gives you valuable insight you can use to shape your strategic plan, rather than moving forward with naive optimism or limited information about how things have been working up to this point. The start, stop, continue framework helps organizations focus on activities that contribute to achieving desired outcomes, ensuring that efforts are aligned with measurable results.

Strategic planning pulls all of the individual projects into a cohesive strategy that supports the company’s overarching goal.

3. Update your plan and strategic objectives

Your strategic plan is a resource that will guide your company through its entire lifespan. However, that doesn't mean it's set in stone once you finish it; it should evolve as your company does. 

So, don't set it and forget it. Set aside time regularly (ideally quarterly) to review your plan progress and make any necessary changes or updates. By keeping it fresh, your strategic plan will remain a helpful resource rather than an outdated, irrelevant document that just collects digital dust.

How does software help with strategy execution?

Thinking about opening a static document and jotting the initial notes for your company’s strategic plan? Not so fast.

Using collaborative document software will make the entire strategic planning process easier by helping you:

• Create specific roadmaps

• Assign tasks to people

• Gather and track information in one place

• Involve other team members in the process

• Seamlessly make updates

• Use strategy maps to align organizational goals and initiatives visually

• Apply balanced scorecards to measure and track key organizational elements

Project plans can also complement strategic plans by providing detailed action steps for implementation.

So ditch the inflexible docs and let technology take some of the stress out of your strategic planning. 

Pull your strategic plan together

Strategic plans range from straightforward to complex. Some are a single page, while others are lengthy documents. That means you have the flexibility to put together something that works for your company.

When getting started, your strategic plan should include:

• Brief description of your company: A quick rundown of your history and highlights of your major products and/or services.

• Mission statement: Describes the purpose behind why your company exists.

• Vision statement: Describes your vision for the future. Rather than where you are now, where do you aim to be?

• Core values: The guiding principles and beliefs that influence all organizational decisions and behavior.

• Action plans: Specific, actionable initiatives with assigned responsibilities, timelines, and resources to ensure effective implementation.

The rest of your strategic plan will be dedicated to your (you guessed it) strategy. To make this more manageable, we suggest breaking this down into three buckets:

• Objectives: These are the large, measurable goals your company wants to achieve. Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals is essential in strategic planning.

• Strategies: These are the more bite-sized steps you’ll take to build toward that goal. Evaluate strategic options to determine the best path forward and ensure resources are allocated to support high-impact initiatives.

• Tactics: These are the individual action items that will fall under the strategies you determine.

It’s also important to cascade strategic goals and KPIs to business units and across all organizational levels, ensuring alignment and impact on overall performance.

Let’s look at an example for some clarity. Here’s what this could look like within your strategic plan:

Objective: Increase our total sales from $850,000 to $1 million by the end of the first quarter.

Strategy: Create an email campaign to convert free trial users into paid users.

• Tactic 1: Segment our email list into paid subscribers and free users.

• Tactic 2: Generate a special offer for users who convert to paid tiers.

• Tactic 3: Write a three-email series to inspire them to convert.

Notice how the large objective breaks down into actionable steps? You’ll continue to repeat that for each strategic plan. Each objective should have several strategies supporting it, and then each strategy will include numerous tactics.

A well-crafted strategic plan not only provides a detailed roadmap but also helps your organization build and sustain a competitive advantage.

Start winning with a strategic plan

Without a strategic plan, teams can quickly lose focus. Confusion will spread, frustrations will fester, and you’ll be spinning your wheels rather than getting important work accomplished.

This is where strategic planning can save the day. By investing the effort into a strategic plan — and assembling a dedicated team of strategic planners to guide the process — you can better focus your efforts, make more informed choices, streamline communication, and make progress on the things that matter most. 

Effective strategic planning involves clear phases: strategy development, where goals are defined and plans are created; strategy implementation, where those plans are put into action; and strategy execution, where progress is monitored and adjustments are made to ensure success.

Sound like it’s well worth your time and energy? We thought so. Strategic planning helps organizations achieve desired outcomes by aligning efforts and ensuring everyone is working toward the same long-term objectives. All that’s left to do now is get started. We promise, especially when you put these strategies to work, it’s not nearly as tough as it seems.

Start with a free strategic planning template