Planning and Strategy

Planning is the process of preparing yourself in advance and developing steps before making actions for achieving results. Whereas Strategy is the process of using the best course of action for achieving long-term desired results. We can understand planning is the initial step of any strategy. The only difference is, in planning, we follow a flow chart of steps for achieving a result, but the strategy is the sum up of multiple plans, competitive moves for the accomplishment of the goal.

Before accomplishing any result, you have to create multiple options and then the best suitable option is call planning. After choosing the best plan from multiple assumed plans and taking that into practical consideration with competitive and dynamic moves for long-term purpose is the strategy.

Planning Steps:

1. Define objective

2. Forecast for planning

3. Identify alternatives

4. Evaluation of alternatives

5. Selection of best alternative

6. Implementation

7. Review and Follow up

Strategy Steps:

Before formulation of any strategy, environmental scanning is the important part. It will help you to identify threats and opportunity in the internal and external environment of organization. After that you can follow below steps considering results of internal and external environment scanning:

1. Setting objectives

2. Evaluation of Organizational environment

3. Setup quantitative target

4. Prepare departmental plans aiming last result

5. Performance analysis

6. Choice of strategy