Effective management and strategic planning are fundamental for any project or business to thrive in the long term. Recognizing the importance of these aspects, successful companies consistently engage in meticulous planning and evaluation of strategies to optimize their tactics, resource allocation, team dynamics, and operational procedures.

One invaluable tool that can facilitate this process is the Strategic Planning Template. This comprehensive document serves as a guide, helping you consolidate all the critical factors that impact your business. By utilizing this template, you can streamline your planning process and ensure a well-defined path toward achieving your goals.

In the following sections, we will delve into the intricacies of this resource, providing you with step-by-step instructions on how to utilize it effectively. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, this strategic planning template will empower you to bring your vision to fruition and pave the way for your business's success. Let's delve into how to make the most of this invaluable tool and unlock your full potential.

A strategic plan is a comprehensive document that serves as a roadmap, outlining all the activities and tasks necessary to achieve the main goals and objectives of a business. By sharing this document with all stakeholders, everyone gains a clear understanding of the strategic planning process and the resources and tasks required to accomplish the desired outcomes.

In other words, a strategic plan represents your business strategy when stating your mission and vision. Moreover, this plan is a great help for teams continuously adapting to needs and changes in the projects, industries, and regulatory conditions.

Your strategic plan resumes all the key elements that make a specific project come to fruition. This document also provides a clear direction for your project, clarifying its general vision statement, marketing strategy, internal and external factors, assessments, risks, and more. But beyond this, some clear benefits are the following:

1. It Helps You to Track Business Goals Across Departments

This file is crucial for project management since you can establish goals and track progress with all the involved departments during all project phases. Each department builds its strategic plans to achieve its particular goals. This way, departments help your company to develop its overall business strategy and achieve its general goals. 

Still, since a strategic plan is a static document, it gains flexibility if it is used with management software, such as Microsoft Project. Thanks to this software, you can create a Gantt chart that will allow you to manage and track tasks and goals better, considering critical paths.

Microsoft Project Pro 2021 Global Key is available in RoyalCDKeys.  

2. It Provides Your Roadmaps for Reaching Strategic Goals

Since a strategic plan provides your teams with a competitive analysis, they can construct and develop proper roadmaps to achieve goals. Roadmaps involve all the key initiatives that team members must carry out to maintain the workflow straightforwardly, advancing to a common objective. 

These roadmaps describe short- and long-term objectives, including each objective's start and end dates and how tasks will develop with other activities to integrate a joint strategic goal.

3. It Allows You to Communicate Your Business Objectives to Business Partners

One of the key objectives of strategic plans is that all the stakeholders meet your project's strategic vision, missions, marketing, and schedule. We mean investors, participants, partners, and other external stakeholders with a particular interest in the success of your project. 

Since a strategic plan clearly outlines the aspects mentioned above and more, it is the best way of letting partners know all the crucial information about the project. 

Using an affordable template, which you can print and share directly with your partners, you can better communicate ideas behind your vision. This way, you can gain new participants, investments and boost your business growth. 

Below we are listing the crucial features that cannot be missing in your strategic planning template.  

1. Executive Summary

This corresponds to a brief description of the whole strategic plan, highlighting all the key aspects, goals, objectives, milestones, resources, and efforts your company will put over the table to take the project to the expected end. It should be a short introduction. 

2. Vision Statement

The vision statement serves as a lens through which your company perceives its functions and services. In essence, it communicates your business's perspective on the products it offers and the positive impact they can make on people's lives. Beyond that, the vision statement also articulates the long-term goals and outlines how your company sees its future.

3. Mission Statement

Contrary to the abovementioned statement, this statement is a more “realistic” statement, with feet on the ground. It corresponds to a brief description of the company's raison d'être and its purpose. In this section, you should highlight why your procedures stand out over competitors by using an inspirational point of view.

4. SWOT Analysis

SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats – defines these four crucial aspects of your business and specific project. Your brand can understand its current performance through a SWOT analysis template and build a proper strategic plan for company goals. To effectively assess a SWOT analysis, you should consider key performance indicators since these can reveal what is working and what is not.

5. Business Goals

There is little to say about business goals since the title itself describes what you should include in this part. In a nutshell, describe the final target your business aims to achieve. Clarifying goals will allow you to communicate them better to employees and partners to lead production in the right direction. 

6. Marketing Plan

Your marketing team is responsible for planning and executing the marketing plan by considering all available distribution channels and resources. Marketing members will address the target audience in different media using additional resources like SEO, PPC advertising, social media advertising, and more. 

Here you should explain what steps your department will take to promote your products and services and what are the final objectives of the marketing. It would help to describe how your marketing plans measure results. Some crucial marketing metrics are ROAS – Return On Ad Spend – and Click-through rate. 

7. Operations Plan

This part of your document should outline all milestones and goals and how your business plans to meet them. As its name indicates, here you define all the specific operations and people responsible for carrying them out.

8. Financial Projections

Every project your business carries out has a final goal: getting a high income. You should be capable of forecasting income by correctly writing a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. Financial projects should clarify the key results your company looks to achieve in the middle and long term.  

9. Team

We can say the “Team section” is where you describe human resources and the employees who are part of each department within your company. Here you should identify and describe the skills and experience of each team member and how they contribute to the vision statements.

Creating a strategic action plan involves nine crucial steps you should consider to effectively build a document that will be useful for your purposes. 

1. Analyze Your Business Environment

You must understand what is happening in the industry your business develops its products and services. It means you need to understand your direct competitors and customers and what section of the market you want to address. 

2. Set Your Strategic Direction

In the second step, you should ask yourself the overall business purpose, how your operations should reflect them, and your main goals. Here you plan general strategies, describing tasks and activities necessary for operations. Some questions to consider should be:

• Where do you plan your business in one, two, and three years?

• On what operating your business will focus in the next period?

3. Set and Develop Strategic Goals and Objectives

Considering your business's direction in the next months and years, you should plan your short, middle, and long-term goals. It would help if you clarified how the same goals reflect your mission, vision, and values. Strategic goals will define your project's roadmap to reach short-term objectives. Some questions could be:

• What daily activities must your teams complete toward your strategic goals? 

• What is the best way of communicating your strategic objectives and goals?   

4. Breakdown to Department-Level Objectives

Once you know all general activities should be completed; it’s time to break them down by department to ensure each team knows what they need to complete. In this regard, you must clarify what concerns each department and how their short-term goals feed general strategic goals. Department-level objectives must be aligned with available resources and roles on a regular basis. Consider the following relevant information:

• What minimal-crucial tasks should be completed before continuing with other tasks?

• What ongoing sub-projects are a priority, and what potential risks? 

5. Manage and Analyze Performance

Measuring results and evaluating performance is crucial in any planning process, and strategic planning is no different. It would be best to build a strategic planning team within your organization to analyze the measurable results you get. You should ask:

• Are the various factors involved in the process, like tasks and activities, aligned to ensure the work is completed?

• What are the metrics managers and teams should utilize to measure performance?

• How will data be collected and reported? 

6. Review and Develop Your Strategic Plan

Once you determine crucial phases, tasks, resources, and how your team will evaluate results, you can review all the strategic action plans and adjust and develop improvements for your original plan. Here you describe what methods you will use to evaluate action plans and what is the strategy execution framework. Some helpful questions to consider are the following:

• How do you conduct the review process, and what action steps will be taken?

• How often will you evaluate strategic planning?

The templates we share below greatly support writing your strategic plan. Then, consider saving them in your portfolio and using them to facilitate processes. 

Strategic Business Plan Template

Download it from Smartsheet.

This comprehensive strategic business plan template includes all the crucial company information, SWOT analysis, research, goal setting, resources, potential risks, and more. This communication tool provides a well-planned structure for your business planning process you can easily update and modify. It’s a great guide for assessing your brand and identifying opportunities for growth and development.

Strategic Plan Template

Download it from ProjectManager.

This is a basic Microsoft Word strategic plan template that contains all the sections mentioned in previous sections. It integrates enough space to describe each point as you consider better explaining purposes. This free template is an easy-to-use document you can easily print and share with all the business units or external stakeholders to clarify strategies. It is perfect for small businesses or organizations that must quickly communicate general ideas and highlight priorities.

Enterprise Strategic Plan

Download it from TemplateLab.

This template corresponds to an extended document describing the enterprise strategic planning methodology in detail by describing the context, the intent, the capability gap analysis, and the improvement plan. This document is completely customizable and integrates all the key elements you need to analyze for your planning, such as business drivers, environmental factors, goals and objectives, growth opportunities, and more. This is a perfect document for small and medium businesses looking to give a professional aura to their project since they can adjust it with just a few clicks. 

Successful companies must build a medium and long-term planning document to focus on the big picture and its final growth objectives. Strategic planning can be for particular projects or the development of the business through the years; this way, it can clarify how it sees itself in a desired future state.

The documents shared here will help you understand your organization's current state by setting goals, a budget, and a large-scale vision and mission for the next few years. 

Anyway, you'll still need some other value tools to ensure the success of your business, such as sales templates, profit statements, schedules, a timeline, charts, etcetera. Browse our blog for free tools and templates and convert your business into the one you always dreamed of.