Tuesday, January 28, 2020

The roles of strategic planning and implementation

The roles of strategic planning and implementation Strategic planning refers to defining an organizations strategies, direction of guidelines, and making decisions on how the organization allocates its resources to pursue those strategies. The key resources of an organization include capital, land, properties and people (workforce). Allocation of such resources is a major function of strategic planning process. A company may use different techniques to implement its strategic planning such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, PEST (Political, Economical, Social and Technological) analysis, STEER (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological and Regulatory) analysis, and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal) analysis. Whatever the analysis technique is, the main purpose of making strategic planning for business is to set out the future courses of actions for an organization. Strategic planning process deals with the following questions: What do we do? For whom do we do it? and How do we excel it? or How can we beat or avoid competition? (Bradford Duncan, page 1). Strategic planning is typically being made for 3 to 5 calendar years for most of the business organizations. However, some companies set their vision for up to 20 years. STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS The preparatory phase of starting any new business both for profit making and not for profit organization relies greatly on setting strategies and making appropriate strategic planning. In order to do so, an organization analyses its current situation, objectives and marketing plans. Analysis of current situation mostly deals with the previous years Business Trend analysis, Market analysis, Competitive analysis, Market segmentation, Marketing mix, SWOT analysis, Positioning-analyzing perceptions and analyzing Sources of information. A companys Objectives and Marketing plans deal with the future Marketing strategies, Desired market segmentation, Desired marketing-mix, TOWS-based objectives as a result of the SWOT, Positions and perceptual gaps and Yearly sales forecasts. APPROACHES TO STRATEGIC PLANNING Among numerous approaches of making strategic planning, most organizations typically follow a three step process called Situation-Target-Path technique, where an organization evaluates the current situation of the business and how it came about, defines its goals and objectives, and maps a possible route to implement those goals and objectives. There is an alternative to this approach called Draw-See-Think approach, where the company draws the ideal image or the desired end-states, sees todays situation and persisting gaps from the ideal and its possible reason, thinks what specific actions must be taken to close the gap between todays situation and ideal state. FOR PROFIT AND NON-PROFIT STRATEGIC PLANNING Different organization carries out the strategic planning process differently. This variation in strategic planning process depends more on the size and nature of the organization rather the profit/non-profit status of the entities. Small size organizations whether profit or not for profit carry out their strategic planning almost similarly that differs from large organizations. On the other hand, large for profit or large non-profit organizations tend to conduct similar planning activities that are different from those conducted in small organizations. However, there are some differences in strategic planning process in terms of profit or non-profit status of the organization by the following criteria: Non profit organizations give more emphasize on board development, fundraising and volunteer management, where in profit making organizations, emphasize is placed on activities to maximize profits more. ROLES OF STRATEGIC PLANNING Strategic planning plays an important role in the business area and also in the public areas such as education, healthcare or government. It is practiced and implemented widely everywhere both informally and formally. In any business organization the roles of strategic planning depend on the nature of the organizations leadership, culture of the organization, complexity of the organizations environment, size of the organization, expertise of the planners etc. According to the diverse goals or objectives of different business entity, various technique of strategic planning is used, for example, goal-based strategic planning, issue-based, organic or scenario-based strategic planning, etc. But in general, strategic planning serves the following purposes in almost every organization: à ¢- º Clearly defines the purpose of the organizations and set the objectives or goals à ¢- º Communicate those goals and objectives to the organizations constituents à ¢- º Develop a sense of ownership of the plan à ¢- º Use the organizations resources most effectively by focusing on key priorities à ¢- º Provide a base from which progress can be measured à ¢- º Listen to everyones opinion to build consensus about where the organization is going à ¢- º Focus more on production most effectively and efficiently in order to grow the production à ¢- º Works as a bridge between staffs/employees and board of directors à ¢- º Helps in team work with employees/staff and board members à ¢- º Works as a glue that keeps board members together à ¢- º Produce a sense of satisfaction among planners, especially around a common vision à ¢- º Solves major problems in the organization It was thought in the old days that only the big enterprises need formulate strategies and adopt a strategic planning process. But with the span of time, the business environment has changed to a great extent. Todays business environment has become more competitive and challenging. To survive in this competition, any organization whether big or small should come forward with the best quality products or services that will satisfy the changing requirements of the customers. Customers have become choosier as they are getting more alternative products and services. They will take the products that will best serve their requirements, in terms of quality or price. Satisfying these customers is not so easy job. For that, an organization must come forward with the best products/services to remain in the leading position. For that reason, every business organization, small or big needs to formulate and implement its business strategies. Only the good strategies can make an organization succe ssful in todays competition and helps them to survive. Bigger companies will always be ahead in this race, as they have got rigorous strategies that are being planned and implemented throughout each of their levels. Smaller companies always thrive for survival and try to grow bigger. Strategic planning provides an organization direction. With the help of this, organizations can know their position in the industry and take appropriate measures for future growth and expansion. Strategic planning also help them to process day to day business functions, which are very important to run the business successfully. A companys mission/vision can never be attained without a proper strategic planning and the objectives of the company can not be achieved without it. A strategic planning process helps an organization in meeting the following perspectives: Focused purpose: Strategic planning helps the organizations to define their short term business purposes clearly, i.e. where they want to see themselves in a year or two years of time, making the profit targets, segmenting their market, and making different marketing mix. Strategic planning ensures that mission is realistic and achievable and being taken with due considerations of current business trend and analysis. Good planning serves the best interests of the stakeholders. Moreover, it defines a point of differentiation. Future Perspectives: In considering the future perspectives of an organization, the strategic planning clearly defines the long term objectives, i.e. the vision of the organization, identifies the long-term interests of the stakeholders, and provides a foundation for decision-making to the management of the organization. Strategic advantage: Strategic planning helps an organization achieving the competitive advantage over others and makes it clearly understood to all the stakeholders of the company. It also increases the employee productivity by clearly presenting the roles and duties they need to serve for the organization. External assessment: A good strategic planning helps an organization in assessing the external factors outside the business entity, which is very important to be successful and to remain ahead of the competition. An external assessment reflects an organizations approaches to gather and analyze essential market data, e.g. studying macro and micro economic information, identifying industry opportunities and threats, and understanding what it takes to be successful in a given market. Customer profiles: Customer profiling is an external business assessment by the organization that define reasons why the customers should buy its products or services and the benefits persisting with such products. It also defines the reason why the customers should not buy some products or services, assess the customers bargaining power. Moreover, strategic planning helps the organization know the customers preferences of different choices of distribution channels. Industry and competitive analysis: This is an important component of business strategy that helps the organization in identifying the primary competitors in the industry, determines potential and indirect competitors, also identifies their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, helps the organization in assessing the threats of substitute products or services or new entrants into the market place. A good planning helps the organization in comparing growth rate with industry standard, and evaluates ongoing market process. Environmental assessment: Strategic planning does the following to assess the business environment for the organization; identifying the regulatory requirements; Assessing vulnerability to adverse business cycle, summarizing opportunities and threats due to economic condition, new technology, demographic structure, legal or political events, socio-cultural norms, and the natural environment. Assessing key success factors: Strategic planning helps the organization in assessing the key success factors in doing business. Key success factors are identified with a critical thinking process that includes implementation of critical thinking process; measuring competitive intensity; setting the demand of products or services within the market; defining key drivers to success within the industry; and consistently monitoring key influences within the industry. Internal assessment: By making strategic plans, an organization can assess its internal factors which help the organization to evaluate its own strengths and weaknesses. Self assessment is very vital to sustain as a successful business entity. An organizations internal assessment process refers to the evaluation of its management process which includes: Finance: Strategic planning determines whether an organization has enough fund available for investment or for ongoing business functions; sets up a comprehensive pricing model; keep the consistency of performance within a range of financial goal; makes a targeted long ranged financial plan; employs a cost benefit approach to resource allocation; makes a financial plan that allow flexibility and economic or environmental disruption. Research development: Having a strategic planning process empowers an organization to integrate all appropriate departments with RD, maintain a creative and innovative process; and ensures that RD department has all required resources to fulfill its functions. Production: Strategic planning program helps an organization to integrate all of its departments to support the production process; maintains that the production process is cost-effective, flexible, fast and responsive. Marketing: Strategies helps an organization in making coordination among all the departments to support marketing, defining marketing plans, branding the products or services, usage of database to track all the customers and market information, promotion of the products or services, and monitoring the ROI of all marketing campaigns. Sales Distribution: By planning its strategies, an organization consistently achieves sales goals, ensures that its sales personnel have got the required skills to achieve plan are being provided with necessary information to achieve their goals, employs a well defined sales management process, and coordinates all other departments to support sales process. Customer servicing: If the organization takes the appropriate strategic planning, then it can define the standard of its customer service, meet the customers expectations, measure the satisfaction level of the customers, achieve the customer loyalty by building a high commitment between employees and managers, and maintain a customer relationship management system that provides critical service information to make the best decision IMPLEMENTATION OF PLANNING PROCESS After formulating the strategies, a firms main concern is how to implement those selected strategies. This is done by means programs, budgets and procedures that involve the firms resources and motivation of the staffs to achieve such objectives. In order to ensure that the planning process is not a document that ends up collecting dust on the shelf, an organization should follow some guidelines that will ensure that the planning is being implemented. An organization can do that by involving people who will be responsible for implementing the plan, can make a cross functional team combining representatives from each department who will be liable to ensure that the plan is realistic and collaborative. In order to that, the organization must continue asking them whether the plans are realistic or not, or can they really achieve all their goals or not. The organization can organize the overall strategic plan into small action plans. In the overall planning document, the organization should specify who is doing what and by when it is going to be implemented. Some organizations may elect to include the action plans in a separate document from the strategic plan, which would include only the mission, vision, values, key issues and goals, and strategies. The organization should also specify and clarify the plans implementation roles and responsibilities in the implementation section of the plan and make a regular review on the progress of the implementation plan. Translating the strategic plans actions into job descriptions can stimulate the implementation process quicker. When people involved in any process know that the action plans will be regularly reviewed, then the implementers tend to do their jobs before they are being checked. So organization needs to review the plan time to time and communicate with the personnel involved in the process. Moreover, the organization can integrate the plans goals and objectives into chief executives performance review, this will get the implementation process more importance as the chief executives involvement and support in the plan is a major driver to the plans implementation. Regular feedback on the implementation plan from the planning participants to the executive committee is also very important in strategy implementation. Make sure that the organization has designated rotating checkers to verify if each implementer completes his/her assigned tasks. The organization should also grow an attitude of helping each other among the implementers in the strategy implantation program. The way by which the strategies are being implemented can have a significant impact on whether it will be successful or not. For this reason, care must be taken to communicate the strategies among implementers. For a sustained and successful strategies carried out by an organization, the implemented strategies must be regularly viewed and monitored, and necessary adjustments should be made time to time. Bradford and Duncan (2000). Simplified Strategic Planning. Chandler House. Patrick L. Burkhart and Suzanne Reuss (1993). Successful Strategic Planning: A Guide for Nonprofit Agencies and Organizations. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning http://managementhelp.org/plan_dec/str_plan/str_plan.htm Mintzberg, Henry, Lampel, J., Ahlstrand, B., Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Four Geometry Formulas Essay -- Geometry

As you begin the course of geometry students are generally familiarized with frequently used formulas in mathematics. These formulas include finding the perimeter and area of two-dimensional figures and finding the volume and surface area of three-dimensional figures. For every diverse shape there is a related formula for finding its perimeter, area, volume, or surface area. Therefore, we will only focus on four formulas for four singular shapes or figures. We will find the perimeter of a square, the area of a triangle, the volume of a right circular cylinder and the total surface area of a sphere. The first formula will correspond to finding the perimeter of a square. For the following formula P will stand for the perimeter and s will represent the side length of the square. The perimeter of a square is found by multiplying four by the side length of the square. Thus, the formula would be P=4s. The motive that the four is in the formula is because a square has four sides. Now let’s use an example, if a square has a side length of 4 inches on every of its four sides the formul...

Saturday, January 11, 2020

Personal and Professional Moral Compass Essay

There are many influences that can affect how individuals think, behave, and react when confronted with an ethical dilemma. People make decisions throughout their life that are guided by what they have encountered through personal experiences, as well as cultural and spiritual influences. With the cultural diverseness of our Western society, there is more of an â€Å"emphasis on self-reliance and individualism† when it comes to nursing (Ludwick, 2000). Respect for human dignity and the importance for an individual to have an active role in making their own health care decisions is an important factor in nursing practice. In our society, it is important to have control over one’s emotions and desires in relation to personal decisions involving health care. Nurses have an important role in advocating for those that wish to be heard as well as ensuring that the desired care is delivered. At times there is conflict between what a patient wishes and what is considered as ethically correct. As a nurse in the mental health field, it is difficult to be able to classify what the diagnosis of a patient is just as much as identifying the medication for that diagnosis. Serving alongside some of the veterans that are seen in the mental health clinic sometimes brings about the question if they are receiving the right type of care. There is much stigma placed upon mental health care and when identifying the individual as a veteran, many times their feelings and troubles are generalized. By recognizing this, many veterans within the clinic are followed more closely by outreach calls that ensure patient safety in addition to tracking their overall mental health status. Perhaps there is a personal level of commitment attached to these veterans due to a connection involving combat and its repercussions. Personal feelings can also hinder a nurse in providing the ‘desired care’  that a patient requests. Because society is so diverse there are many beliefs, either spiritual or cultural, that can conflict with a nurse’s values and morals. For example; it had been identified that a psychotic patient was in dire need for intervention through medication. With this patient’s cultural beliefs, he was unable to follow through with the care suggested. The result of this situation ended with the patient being arrested, placed on hospital hold, and eventually being forced to take these medications. The ethical dilemma entailed nurses and doctors to identify that their obligation was to not only keep the public safe, but to ensure that the patient was safe, thus overriding his personal desires. Although many medical professionals feel that they know the right or wrong answer based on what they have learned in textbooks, it may not always be the best answer for the patient. There are many events that can affect diverse ways of thinking, which shapes each individual nurse’s practice. After exposure to different cultures, a nurse is able to recognize and begin to appreciate beliefs that are unlike his or her own. Some cultures do not allow an individual to make decisions of their own, sometimes impeding necessary care that can sustain their life. This idea of holding back care is all that the medical professional identifies when confronted with these dilemmas. They are unable to appreciate or fully understand why this individual is being ‘forced’ to refuse care. This is difficult to comprehend when it is so evident about what should be done. Patients understand and respect the opinion of the health care providers; otherwise they would not be seeking care. It is the nurse’s responsibility to keep each patient from harm in addition to sustaining their dignity and respect. When seeking care, one is identifying that they are unable to tackle the problem alone and is in need of assistance from another. This vulnerability should be respected and the health care provider should include them and all of their values within the plan of care. There will always be an event or situation that entails a nurse to set aside their personal beliefs and do what is right for the patient in a given situation. Even though some issues can be affected by a nurses own values,  the benefits and the consequences should be individually considered. If the patient is of sound mind and is doing no harm to themselves or others, perhaps it is best to allow them to identify what is best for them. It is an obligation to ensure that a patient receives the best care that they deserve. References Burkhardt, M. &. (2008). Ethics & Issues in Contemporary Nursing. Clifton Park: Delmar. Ludwick, R. &. (2000). Ethics: Nursing Around the World: Cultural Values and Ethical Conflicts. Online Journal of Issues in Nursing. 5 (3), 1-4. Appendix A Resource 1: My Nursing Ethic PASSION: Why am I here? I have always felt that I am here to help others, regardless of the profession I chose. I had started off as an elementary education major and ended up graduating with my psychology degree. From there I had joined the Army to become a medic to provide care to those who I had fought next to during war time. I found myself wanting to learn more and became a nurse to advocate for patients as well as care for them medically. I lost many friends through deployments and many of them are lost within themselves. I want to be the nurse that not only understands, but listens to what they have to say. I feel very strongly about establishing a rapport with my patients, even if I only speak to them once. I want them to know that there is someone there that they can talk to when the time comes. MOTIVATION: What moves me to act? Someone who genuinely needs assistance with a situation, despite how great or how diminutive it may seem. When I hear about how something that has been resolved or attended to because of what I had done, it motivates me even more to continue with my persistence in difficult situations. I find that  when there is respect for my profession from providers and others, this also increases my motivation. I find it motivating when I finally am able to assist a patient with positive changes that has been difficult for others to do so in the past. It is always motivating to be successful with a challenging and ‘hard to work with’ patient; all it takes is time, caring and listening. Working alongside others that are motivated also will have an effect on my motivational level. INSPIRATION: What keeps me in motion? I am most inspired by my patients. I feel that those that served before, with and after me deserve my undivided attention. Those that are truly searching for help and are motivated to do everything they can to get better, inspire me. I also find that colleges who depend on my knowledge and experience inspire me to become a better and more understanding nurse. I realize that many times, the VA is the only place many veterans can receive care (or even a hot meal); this reminds me that I may be the only one left who will listen. LOYALTY: Whom do I serve? Although I am here to assist the providers, I am here to serve the patients that are our country’s veterans. I make myself available and would go the extra mile to ensure they receive the best care and treatment that they deserve. I served alongside many of them during deployments and feel that I can continue to do this by being the best advocate they can have at

Friday, January 3, 2020

The Second Amendment Of The United States - 2402 Words

The United States of America has always been referred to as the land of the free. The United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights were put in place to ensure that the citizen’s basic rights were not violated. Even with these documents in place, certain rights have often been the center of heavy debate. The fourth amendment which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, or the first amendment which protects free speech, or the fifth amendment which protects you from self incrimination. Of all these rights that have been brought into question, the most recent is the second amendment which secures the right for the people to keep and bear arms. Many people believe that there is no reason for anyone to need certain†¦show more content†¦It wasn t until the 1930’s when opponents of the second amendment started to take action at the federal level. One law that was established at this time was the National Firearms Act of 1934. The National firearms Act stated that any weapon considered a machine gun or short barreled rifle, including sawed off shotguns, would have a tax of $200 imposed on the transfer of that weapon. During this period Homer Cummings, the attorney general for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a very anti second amendment politician. He began developing a plan to create a national registry, controlled by the central government, to keep track of guns and their owners. Unfortunately for Cummings, his plans quickly became unpopular when World War II started. People quickly realized the importance of having a firearm handy when the need arises. Gun control advocates seized their push for gun control measures until a further time. It wasn t until the 1960’s when gun control was brought back up, this time stronger than ever before. They used the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and JFK to fuel their campaign against guns. This was the perfect time to go after the second amendment as modern liberalism had become the dominant political view in the country. It didn’t help that at this time the Vietnam war was taking place. This added to the dislike of guns as many people were against the war and violence.