Strategic planning is very important to attain organizational goals as it shows the ways to reach the targets. There are some issues involved in strategic planning and those issues must be scrutinized properly and setting priorities in terms of importance and time. Sometimes top managements face little bit difficulty to choose proper issues with respect to priorities as there are some agreements and disagreements among the opinions of those members. If there are a few incongruities about priorities and issues, it may be able to shift instantly to the organizational visions then targets. But if there is no agreement among the decision makers then it is important to indentify issue priorities and identify critical options. It can be possible in different ways and some of the ways are describing in the following section:
• First of all, board and staff can scan the internal and external environment of an organization and select some certain issues which are strategic and have great impact on the organization. They must prioritize the issues including why those issues are important, what is the positive and negative consequence of those issues and so on. All these issues might involve a wide range of other issues and programs like what will be the future demands, who will be the future customers, where they will operate and how they will operate to attain their goals and with whom they will work.
• Another way is planning group or a consultant will work with the company and scan the environment and find out the issues and then prioritize them in terms of feasibility, timing and importance. There will be some set of strategic issues which will be the part of strategic planning process. First set will get the most importance than any other sets. Board of committee or appointed staffs will review those issues and prepare their strategic planning according to the prioritizing issues.
Issues can be indentified in both ways but for the proper harmony there will be agreements among the decision makers otherwise it is tough to prepare proper strategic planning.
Moreover, Sadler (2003) defines strategic planning as the form of systematized, step-by-step, procedure to develop an organization’s strategy. This strategic planning involves with many issues and Sadler (2003) has identified five (5) major issues which involve with strategic planning namely, confusing strategy with the strategic plan, detachment from reality, paralysis by analysis, lack of ownership, and dampening of innovation.
There can be confusion with the existing strategies at the stage of strategic planning. Managers may feel that the strategic planning is the planning of same strategies which they are practicing now. Also detachment from reality is also another issue. Sadler (2003) argues that strategic planning is an intellectual process and it damages to the reality of operation. This basically happens because of the lack of involvement for the strategic planning of employees. The next issue is paralysis by analysis. This argues that strategic planning can be over-detailed because of the extensive analysis. Lack of ownership is another problem. Most of strategies are planned by the corporate planning department or by the senior management. Thus, it can be argued that strategic planning does not have a wide spread of ownership within the organisation. The final argument is that strategic planning is dampening of innovation. This mainly happen since strategic planning introduces many strict controls to the organisation and it limits the flexibility of the organisation (Sadler, 2003).