Definition
The management team's vision of how to win over clients, products, channels, quality, delivery and costs over the long term, answers the question "What game to play, how to win".
In detail
The Strategic Plan is the management team's collective consensus on the path to long-term victory, answering two fundamental questions: "what game to play and how to win." It addresses direction setting and resource focus, preventing the organization from spreading its energy across too many opportunities. Unlike Policy Deployment (PD), the Strategic Plan focuses on "setting direction," while Policy Deployment focuses on "translating direction into executable Annual Objectives and improvement plans." The Strategic Plan typically outputs a strategy document or workshop minutes covering priorities across customer, product, channel, quality, delivery, and cost dimensions.
Example in practice
When a company enters a new market or faces major competitive changes, the senior team needs to re-examine the business portfolio. For example, an industrial equipment manufacturer finds that traditional markets are growing slowly while demand in emerging fields is rising. At this point, the management team convenes a two-day strategy workshop, uses a Mekko chart to analyze the attractiveness of each market segment and its own capabilities, and clarifies the customer groups and product lines to focus on for the next three years. After the workshop, a clear strategic direction is formed, providing input for subsequent strategy deployment.