Your team has practiced doing strategic planning for a competitor company in an associated industry. The team has done the preliminary work of learning about the process of strategic planning and is now set to begin the necessary preparatory work to assist each division's senior management team in creating its own strategic plan.
You and your team are now ready to assist in the strategic planning process with each division's senior staff. Your team knows that a massive amount of information will need to be collected and collated as part of each division's individual strategic plan. Ahead of your team's visit to each division's headquarters, you are preparing a package of forms and instructions to disseminate to each division head. The purpose of this package is to have each division's senior staff do the necessary legwork to prepare for the week-long strategic planning meetings that you will hold at each site. You want to make sure that each division's staff knows what they have to do, what information they have to collect, and how to present it in a consistent manner. In this fashion, each division's strategic plans will have a consistent look and feel.
Create the necessary blank forms that the management team will need to fill out to gather the appropriate data. At a minimum, the following forms will be needed:
- Industry analysis
- SWOTT analysis
- Competitor analysis and perceptual map
- Five year financial forecast
Provide one set of clear and concise written instructions for the division senior teams to assist them in how to gather the information and transfer it to the appropriate forms for subsequent discussion and collation into the final 5-year strategic plan document. Each form's instructions must be 200-300 words and include examples to help explain how to fill it out.
One cover letter of 200-300 words must be included and addressed to the CEO, who will then distribute the materials and instructions to the senior teams of each division regarding the overall process his or her team will be going through, culminating in a formal strategic planning meeting that you and your team will participate in.
To keep decision making as decentralized as possible, draft 2 policy statements, each of 100-200 words, that each division's CEO will be asked to disseminate and comply with. They must both comply with the following policy-writing guidelines:
- One policy statement must address human resource promotion policy.
- One policy must address capital spending authority levels.