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Strategic Planning Template

Provide an action-oriented improvement framework for your team to continuously improve.

About the Strategic Planning template

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the process of defining your goals and the steps you’ll take to accomplish them. This can occur on an individual, team, department, or company-wide scale. Generally, strategy considers the goals or reasons for doing something while planning refers to the specific actions you’ll take in order to achieve a specific goal. But with strategic planning, you’re considering both at the same time, so the end result will be both your overarching goals as well as the steps you’ll take to achieve them. Many companies use a strategic plan as a guideline, but revisit it from time to time in order to make changes and adjustments. You may decide to reconsider your strategic plan every year, every quarter, or any time your company undergoes a significant change.

How to do strategic planning

Your strategic template may vary depending on whether it’s for a team, company, non-profit, etc. or whether you’re using it to guide short-term initiatives or long-term projects, but many elements are consistent across all types of strategic plans. You can follow all of the steps listed below or choose the ones that are most useful to your specific project. One useful way to think about strategic planning templates is that they will help guide you from where you are now to where you would like to be in the future. 

Step 1: Begin with the introductory statement. In this section, you can explain why you’re developing the plan, what time frame it applies to, and who is participating in the process.

Step 2: Write your background statement. This can include any information about your business that you feel is relevant.

Step 3: Share your vision, values, and mission statement. This gives you an opportunity to reflect on what matters most to your company to ensure that your strategic planning is aligned with company priorities.

Step 4: Write your problem statement. What is the exact problem, pain point, or issue that needs to be addressed?

Step 5: Include a SWOT analysis. This examines your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and can be helpful when formulating your strategy.

Step 6: Define your goals and methods for evaluation. What are you hoping to achieve? How will you know when you’ve achieved it?

Step 7: Write your executive summary. This will be a quick overview for your strategic plan that will provide all the most important information at a glance.

Why use a strategic template?

A strategic planning template can help guide your strategic planning to make sure you cover the most important topics and don’t leave anything out. It also makes it easy to assign different sections to different people based on their role or subject matter expertise. If you’re using the template to guide a planning session, you can also timebox the event by assigning specific amounts of time to work on each section. With Miro, you can share the template and ask participants to add their thoughts either in real-time in a live meeting or asynchronously whenever it’s convenient for them. You can review the board together once everyone has had a chance to add their thoughts.

When to use the strategic planning template

You can use the strategic plan template whenever you’d like to align the goals of a team or department with the company at large. A strategic plan also promotes communication between team members, stakeholders, and clients. If you know your company is facing significant internal or external changes, you can use the strategic planning template to help team members and employees deal with these changes. You may choose to set a regular cadence for revisiting your template, such as once a quarter or once a year, or you may just choose to rework it in response to major events such as mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, funding rounds, etc.

Strategic Planning Template

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