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A Guide to Long-Range Planning (Morrisey, 1996)
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Creating Your Strategic Journey

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Product Description
The second in a three-volume series, A Guide to Long-Range Planning is written primarily for major unit or corporate group heads responsible for three-to-five-year planning. It helps the team outline long-term objectives and translate the vision, mission, and strategy into future organizational positioning.

As with the other volumes in this series, George Morrisey--long recognized as a leading expert in the areas of planning and strategic thinking--offers his insights into how planning actually works in organizations.

Succinct and easy to read, the books in this series can be used in any sequence, and stand on their own as individual guides to more effective planning. The companion volumes include Volume One: Guide to Strategic Thinking, and Volume III: Guide to Tactical Planning. Each draws on examples from individual departments and work units as well as from the perspective of the total organization, making them useful for all types of planning at any level of an organization.

Book Info
Provides the tools needed to uncover the critical strategic issues facing your organization today and to identify the future positions you wish to achieve in such areas as markets and customers, products and services, and technology and financial projections. DLC: Strategic planning.

p.4 Long-range planning is a process that brings your management team together to translate your mission, vision, and strategy into tangible future results... Here are brief descriptions of the four major elements that make up this approach to long-range planning:

Key Strategic Areas (KSAs). These are the major categories on which collective attention must be focused for the foreseeable future...

Critical Issues Analysis. ... Critical issues in your long-range plan will address external opportunities and threats and internal strengths and limitations that will have a major effect on carrying out your mission and strategy and that will require [a relatively long period of time] to effectively resolve...

Long-Term Objectives (LTOs). These objectives represent the strategic positions you wish to reach at some designated time in the future...

Strategic Action Plans (SAPs). These plans identify major steps or milestones that are required to move you towards your long term objectives.

p.21-22 Key Strategic Areas represent those major categories on which collective action must be focused for the foreseeable future. As noted in Chapter One, some KSAs will look similar to Key Results Areas (KRAs), which are the equivalent step in the tactical planning process. KSAs, however, will be focused on the future, broader in scope than KRAs, and designed to help you determine where you want to be as an organization rather than the specific results you want to achieve. Reaching agreement on your KRAs will help you and your team

  • Focus on those portions of your mission, vision, and strategy that need to be addressed in your long-range plan
  • Identify and prioritize the critical strategic issues that represent your organization's strengths, limitations, opportunities, and threats as you proceed on your strategic journey
  • Structure your long-range plan and, specifically, your long-term objectives into categories that will be easy to coordinate and track
  • Form a bridge to the KRAs in your tactical plan to ensure that the steps in your strategic action plan are carried out in an effective and efficient manner
p.22-23 The following basic guidelines can be used to help you determine KSAs for your total organization or your specific unit...
1. They generally should identify those five to eight major categories within which your organization or your unit must establish future positions to be pursued...
2. They should include both financial and nonfinancial areas...
3. They should be focused on issues and future positions that require [effort on a long time scale]...
4. They should directly or indirectly support your organization's mission, vision, and strategic statements...
5. They generally will require cross-functional effort...
6. Each KSA should be limited, generally to two or three words and should not be measurable as stated but contain factors leading to future achievements.
 
p.27 Looking at what the future will bring is both exciting and a bit frightening. Can you really predict what the future will hold for you? Is there any way you can be reasonably sure that you are focusing on the factors that will have the best payoff? The answer to both questions is a qualified yes... In looking ahead strategically, you will focus more on what you think is going to happen than on what you know is going to happen.
What Is Critical Issue Analysis and Why Is It Important?
In strategic planning, critical issue analysis is an assessment of the major factors that are likely to influence how you carry out your organization's mission, vision, and strategy. It requires you to peer into your "crystal ball" and predict what you think is going to happen or needs to happen and what you must do to prepare yourself.
 
p.28 SLOTs stands for "Strengths, Limitations, Opportunities, and Threats." A SLOTs Assessment will help you identify the issues, opportunities, and challenges that need to be analyzed as you prepare your long-range plan.
 
p.51 Long-term objectives are a way to document your dreams.
   Dreams? You've got to be kidding! Objectives are supposed to be measurable and verifiable, and they should represent specific results to which we will be committed, right?
   Sometimes, but not always! Long-term objectives represent the strategic positions you wish to reach at some designated point in the future.
 
p.52 LTOs represent future positions to be attained... LTOs also
... Are broad statements of intent that will produce many specific results
...Can be established without necessarily knowing how they will be reached
 
p.55 How Do We Validate Our Long-Term Objectives?
As a final validation check of your LTOs, I recommend testing each statement against some or all of the following criteria:
1. Is it measurable or verifiable? ...
2. Is it achievable or feasible? ...
3. Is it flexible or adaptable? ...
4. Is it consistent with the rest of your strategic plan?

p.61 In Summary

Long-term objectives represent the strategic positions you wish to reach at some designated point in the future.

They include financial projections [JLJ - perhaps time projections as well], since all LTOs have financial implications and all financial projections must be supported by other LTOs.

LTOs can be established without necessarily knowing how they will be reached.

LTOs may be derived directly from your key strategic areas, or through the process of critical issue analysis.

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