Strategic Planning (Category 2)

Strategic Planning addresses strategic and action planning, deployment of plans, how plans are changed if circumstances require a change, and how accomplishments are measured and sustained. The Category stresses that long-term organizational sustainability and your competitive environment are key strategic issues that need to be integral parts of your organization’s overall planning.

The Baldrige Baldrige Criteria emphasize three key aspects of organizational excellence. These aspects are important to strategic planning:

- Customer-driven quality is a strategic view of quality. The focus is on the drivers of customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer loyalty, new markets, and market share—key factors in competitiveness, profitability, and business success.

- Operational performance improvement contributes to short- and longer-term productivity growth and cost/price competitiveness. Building operational capability—including speed, responsiveness, and flexibility—represents an investment in strengthening your competitive fitness.

- Organizational and personal learning are necessary strategic considerations in today’s fast-paced environment. The Criteria emphasize that improvement and learning need to be embedded in work processes. The special role of strategic planning is to align work processes and learning initiatives with your organization’s strategic directions, thereby ensuring that improvement and learning prepare you for and reinforce organizational priorities.

The Strategic Planning Category examines how your organization

- determines its key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and its ability to execute your strategy.

- optimizes the use of resources, ensures the availability of trained employees, and bridges short- and longer-term requirements that may entail capital expenditures, technology development or acquisition, and supplier development.

- ensures that deployment will be effective—that there are mechanisms to communicate requirements and achieve alignment on three levels: (1) the organization and the executive level, (2) the key process level, and (3) the work unit and individual job level. The requirements in the Strategic Planning Category encourage strategic thinking and acting—to develop a basis for a distinct competitive position in the marketplace. These requirements do not imply formalized plans, planning systems, departments, or specific planning cycles. They also do not imply that all your improvements could or should be planned in advance. An effective improvement system combines improvements of many types and degrees of involvement. This requires clear strategic guidance, particularly when improvement alternatives, including major change, compete for limited resources. In most cases, setting priorities depends heavily on a cost rationale. However, you also might have critical requirements, such as public responsibilities, that are not driven by cost considerations alone.

Go to:

• Item 2.1 Strategy Development

• Item 2.2 Strategy Deployment