Business planning and its different levels

Business planning helps in executing the desired tasks effectively by identifying new business opportunities available. Business planning includes:

• Strategic planning
• Tactical planning 
•  Operational planning

Executing the business plan at three different levels is explained by below picture:

Strategic planning- Important decisions related to organization strategy and resource allocation can be developed at this level. Initially, the policy board decides the vision, mission and goals of an organization. It also suggests evaluation criteria for strategic planning and specifies the policy boundaries. Budget, time and people are the important resources allocated in this level.

Tactical Planning- Reviewing the decisions specified by policy board can be done at this level of planning. Senior management revisits the vision, mission and goals provided by policy board in order to assess whether it can provide benefits to the organization or not. Existing policies will be summarized and sent to next level so that changes can be identified. Senior management also combines all the available resources, identifies the problems and arranges alternates. Thus, in this level policy boundaries and vision, mission and goals of organization can be finalized. 

Operational Planning- Detailed implementation of strategic and tactical planning is done at this level. Management team conducts SWOT analysis, identifies different stakeholders and develops a particular plan of action to reach the goals. Finally, managers allow stakeholders such as customers, employees and shareholders to express their views on developed vision, mission and goals of organization.

A clear step-by-step process to develop strategic plan is:

1. Develop vision, mission and values statements
2. Build a strategic planning process
3. Recognize stakeholders and perform SWOT analysis
4. Recognize the issues in content of strategy
5. Review and adopt the strategic plan
6. Implement the strategic plan and reassess it
7. Allocate the resources like budget, time and staff.
8. Provide the strategic plan to management
9. Manager divides the tasks to different workstations 
10. Embed all the tasks to achieve the organization goal finally

Figure: shows a step-by-step process for strategic planning