Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.

M.I.D.L. helps organizations strategic plan by helping them formally consider the organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

1. "What do we do?"
2. "For whom do we do it?"
3. "How do we excel?"

We use this process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years.

In order to determine where an organization is going, we must know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan."

Strategic planning is a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan your organizational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.

There are many approaches to strategic planning but we use the following processes:

Process A.  3 Step…

• Situation - evaluate the current situation and how it came about.
• Target - define goals and/or objectives (sometimes called ideal state)
• Path - map a possible route to the goals/objectives

Process B.  5 Step…

The Strategic Planning Process

The internal analysis considers the situation within the firm itself, such as:

• Company culture
• Company image
• Organizational structure
• Key staff
• Access to natural resources
• Position on the experience curve
• Operational efficiency
• Operational capacity
• Brand awareness
• Market share
• Financial resources
• Exclusive contracts
• Patents and trade secrets

The strategy is translated into specific policies for functional areas such as:

• Marketing
• Research and development
• Procurement
• Production
• Human resources
• Information systems