Strategic planning
Strategic planning is the structured process of defining long-term objectives and coordinating actions and resources to achieve them under relevant constraints.
BDD in Action, Second Edition
Strategic planning is a recurring process for turning strategic business opportunities and challenges into a prioritized set of deliverable software features.
- How it is used
- Turns strategic business goals, opportunities, and challenges into prioritized features for delivery teams.
- How deep it goes
- Explains purpose, participants, collaboration techniques, prioritization, and recurring cadence, while deferring detailed feature refinement.
- Examples
- Uses Impact Mapping, Pirate Canvases, product backlogs, and weekly or two- to three-month planning cycles as concrete artifacts and practices.
- What you can do after
- Apply it to align stakeholders and delivery teams around valuable, feasible, and adaptable feature priorities.
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Think Like a Software Engineering Manager
Strategic planning is the process of defining longer-term objectives and determining coordinated actions to achieve them.
- How it is used
- Aligns engineering efforts with business goals while setting people and teams up for longer-term success.
- How deep it goes
- Connects planning to alignment, anticipation, delegation, and prioritization but stops short of providing a complete planning framework.
- Examples
- Uses time-quadrant reviews, advance planning for unexpected problems, delegation decisions, and removal of low-value tasks.
- What you can do after
- Apply it by anticipating challenges, protecting long-term priorities, delegating suitable work, and aligning projects with organizational objectives.
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Tech Startup Toolkit
Strategic planning is a structured process for setting organizational direction, formulating long-term strategy, and translating objectives into coordinated actions.
- How it is used
- Guides company direction by turning customer needs, strategy, and objectives into coordinated functional plans.
- How deep it goes
- Defines four phases and team responsibilities, but leaves the detailed ten-step execution for further treatment.
- Examples
- Uses business plans, three-year strategic plans, functional action plans, and ecosystem maps as planning artifacts.
- What you can do after
- Apply a customer-focused planning process that aligns teams and converts company objectives into functional actions.
Related concepts
- reinforcement learningused by · Reinforcement learning is a machine-learning paradigm in which an agent learns actions or a policy through interaction with an environment and evaluative feedback, such as rewards.
- impact mappinguses · Impact mapping is a visual, goal-oriented planning technique that connects goals to actors, desired impacts or behavior changes, and the deliverables intended to support them.
- clientuses · A client is a person, organization, device, or software component that receives or uses a product, service, resource, or functionality provided by another entity.
- business planproduces · A business plan is a structured document describing an organization’s objectives, strategy, operations, business model, and expected financial or operational results.
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