strategic plan simple template

Free Strategic Planning Templates

By Joe Weller | May 16, 2018

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The success of your organization — no matter what size or industry — depends on the thoroughness of your planning and vision. A strategic plan can provide a roadmap for accomplishing specific goals, and will increase your chances of reaching objectives on time and budget. In this article, we’ve rounded up the top strategic planning templates in Microsoft Word and Excel, all of which are free to download and fully customizable.

Additionally, we've provided customizable strategic planning templates in Smartsheet, a collaborative, real-time work execution platform that empowers you to better plan, manage, and report on strategic initiatives.

Strategic Business Plan Template

Download Strategic Business Plan Template

Excel | Smartsheet

A comprehensive, strategic business plan may include company information, SWOT analysis, research, goals, resources, risks and more. A template provides structure for your business planning process as well as a communication tool that’s simple to update or modify. Use the template as a guide for evaluating your business, identifying opportunities for growth and development, and creating a strategic plan.

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Nonprofit Strategic Plan Template

Download Nonprofit Strategic Plan Template

A nonprofit strategic plan often emphasizes vision, values, and mission as the foundation for future objectives. A template can be used to clearly define who is being served and what issues need to be addressed. As with a business plan, nonprofit planning may include sections for evaluating risks and opportunities, measuring financial resources, developing a marketing plan, and creating objectives for organizational change.

HR Strategic Plan Template

‌ Download HR Strategic Plan Template

Create a detailed human resources strategic plan for your organization, or modify the template to focus on one specific area, such as recruitment or employee relations. Use the template to translate strategies into measurable action plans. This simple layout makes it easy for readers to quickly view key information.

IT Strategic Planning Template

‌ Download IT Strategic Planning Template

IT is an essential part of any business, nonprofit, school, or government agency. While information technology is just one part of an overall business strategy, creating a separate strategic plan for IT will help ensure that you have a comprehensive roadmap to follow for managing and purchasing new assets, understanding your current and potential technology usage, and aligning your IT goals with business objectives.

Strategic Marketing Plan Template

‌ Download Strategic Marketing Plan Template

Use this free template to help shape your marketing strategy. It combines information on your target market and business with marketing tactics to help you think strategically and create a plan of action. The template can guide your research process or be used as a simple brainstorming tool.

Social Media Strategy Plan Template

‌ Download Social Media Strategy Plan Template

Social media is an integral part of online marketing, and creating a strategic plan can help ensure that you are using your time and resources effectively. Consider your branding, mission, target audience, competition and other factors to determine which social networks and types of content will perform best for your company. Keep track of KPIs and adjust your social media plan accordingly.

SWOT Analysis Strategy Template

‌ Download SWOT Analysis Strategy Template

This matrix template combines SWOT analysis with strategic planning. Examine the relationships between your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and then list related strategies to tackle your goals. The layout of this template allows you to view the SWOT categories and strategies side-by-side, which may be useful for a presentation or summary.

One-Page Strategic Planning Template

Download One-Page Strategic Planning Template

Excel | Word | Smartsheet

A one-page strategic plan is perfect for small businesses or for summarizing a longer planning process. Use this template as is, or edit the layout or included information to better suit your needs. This template includes all the essentials on one page, including values, strengths and weaknesses, goals, and actions.

Strategic Vision Template

Download Strategic Vision Template

Excel | Word

Summarize your strategic vision and plan, highlighting key information for stakeholders, management, investors, or for your own reference. Combining a vision statement with a brief summary of goals, actions and KPIs makes it easy to see how your business values and purpose relate to your objectives. It also provides a succinct summary for use in a presentation or meeting.

University Strategic Plan Outline

‌ Download University Strategic Plan Outline

This template provides an outline for university strategy planning. The actual strategic plan may cover multiple pages and provide an in-depth analysis and detailed mission and vision statements. Strategic planning is an opportunity for universities to look closely at campus needs, institutional values, infrastructure, long-term goals, important obstacles, and more. The strategic plan will be a guiding document that is reviewed and updated regularly.

What Is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is an organization’s process for defining their strategy so that they can accomplish specific goals and objectives. Strategic planning may be utilized on a large scale, such as planning for business growth over several years or to help a nonprofit or governmental organization reach its stated mission. A strategic plan can also be used on a smaller scale, such as crafting a marketing plan or developing strategy for the goals of one department within a business or organization. It is important to note that strategy is distinct from planning: While strategy looks at why certain steps should be taken, a plan outlines how to enact those steps. strategic planning marries these two concepts in order to determine the best possible course of action. The purpose of strategic planning is to provide a thoughtful, deliberate approach to reaching objectives based on an in-depth analysis of both internal and external factors affecting an organization.

A strategic plan often covers multiple years, addressing both short- and long-term goals. It also provides a way of tracking progress and measuring success. However, it’s not a document that is fixed in stone — instead, it’s wise to revisit and adjust a strategic plan periodically based on the evolving vision, objectives, needs, and resources of a business or institution.

Depending on the scope of your plan, you may be working with a team of multiple stakeholders during the strategic planning process. To keep the process running smoothly, make roles and responsibilities clear. Different parties may be responsible for providing data, reviewing the plan, or authorizing strategic decisions. As you prepare for planning, make sure all participants understand what’s involved in the process and have received any relevant information prior to meeting.

Benefits of Strategic Planning

There are benefits of strategic planning, including the following:

• Align the goals of a department or project with larger business goals
• Provide clear communication to team members, stakeholders, or clients
• Clearly define the vision and mission of an organization
• Provide clarity on how to deal with internal or environmental changes

Parts of a Strategic Plan

One way to think about strategic planning is that it identifies any gaps between a current state and desired future state, and then dictates how to close those gaps — how you get from where you are to where you want to be. To that end, various factors are taken into consideration in order to formulate an effective plan. Here are some of the elements often included in a strategic plan.

• Introductory Statement: The introductory statement should briefly describe why the strategic plan was developed and for what time period, and list the authors of the plan.  
• Background Statement: This section may provide information about the organization, such as history, management structure, and supporting partners or agencies. Alternatively, you could use this section as a brief business statement — more of an elevator pitch — to concisely describe your business.  
• Organizational Structure: Include this information if it’s relevant to evaluate how your business or organization operates and is structured, from governing board to staffing.  
• Vision: A vision statement should briefly describe what a company wants to achieve or become. This is one of the primary organizational tenets to consider, along with values and mission.  
• Values: These are the principles that an organization stands for and abides by. Many businesses create core value statements to guide company culture.  
• Mission Statement: A mission statement describes the purpose of a business or organization. This is distinct from a vision statement because it is not a projected goal for the future.  
• Problem Statement: Some plans include a problem statement, which can outline key or discrete issues that need to be addressed.  
• SWOT Analysis: A SWOT analysis provides a foundation and context for developing strategy by examining the strengths and weaknesses within and organization as well as external opportunities and threats.  
• Goals: As stated earlier, a strategic plan may include long-term as well as short-term (i.e, monthly or quarterly) goals. Objectives should be measurable and broken down into actionable steps, and the action plan for each goal should specify who is responsible for implementing the strategy, a timeline for starting and ending the action, and how the outcome will be evaluated.  
• Evaluation: Methods for evaluation should be spelled out in the strategic plan. This could include tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and documenting the progress of action steps on an ongoing basis.  
• Executive Summary : This final summary helps employees, investors, or other readers quickly understand your plan.

No matter what type of strategic plan you are working on, using a template provides a simple and quick outline to organize your process. In the following sections, you’ll find free, downloadable planning templates for business, nonprofit, human resources, marketing, IT strategic planning, and more.

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10 Free Strategic Planning Templates in ClickUp, Word, and Excel

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

Strategic planning is among the most important processes in any business. It builds the roadmap for the future, creating a framework against which every major business decision can be made and weighed.

But its importance goes beyond that as well. Every type of business planning, from action plans to sprint plans and resource planning , ultimately derives from the larger strategic plan. That means one thing above all: you have to get your strategic planning process right.

To get there, you need to start somewhere. The many resources related to planning are a great start. But even more specifically, you need a template that can help you plug in information, digest that information, and come up with a plan that everyone in the organization can follow.

What exactly that ideal template looks like depends on your needs and existing software. That’s why in this guide, we’re sharing our 10 favorite free strategic planning templates you can start using (almost) immediately.

What is a Strategic Planning Template?

What makes a good strategic planning template, 1. clickup strategic roadmap list template, 2. clickup strategic roadmap timeline template, 3. clickup grand strategy matrix template, 4. clickup strategic plan whiteboard template, 5. clickup strategic marketing plan template, 6. clickup event strategic plan template, 7. clickup action plan template, 8. projectmanager strategic planning word template, 9. powerpoint strategic planning template, 10. excel strategic planning template, who benefits from strategic planning.

A strategic planning template is a roadmap to your business roadmap. It provides business leaders with the exact steps needed to build a plan that can outline the near- and long-term future of the business.

At its best, the template is a measurable tool that everyone involved in the planning process can follow. It helps you solidify where you are, and where you want to go.

And, just as importantly, it helps you consolidate that information into an actionable, measurable, and easy-to-process strategic plan that everyone in the organization can use.

Of course, there is no simple  best business strategy template. Just like a project plan can differ from a product roadmap , you’ll need a template that matches the way you work and the type of planning you’re doing.

That’s why this guide highlights not just one, but 10 free planning templates to cover a variety of needs.

A good strategic planning template accomplishes a few key goals:

• It establishes a clear timeline for the planning process
• It outlines the goals of the strategic plan and derives any actions and strategies from those goals
• It clearly outlines the individual tactics and overall business strategy underlying those goals
• It establishes a way to measure the progress and outcomes of implementing the plan
• It outlines clear responsibilities for individual tasks related to the planning process
• It provides check-in points and opportunities for the team to review and adjust as needed
• It’s customizable enough to make tweaks that can make the plan more relevant for your organization and business planning process

Most importantly, though, the strategic plan template streamlines the entire process. Whereas in processes like capacity planning , details matter above all, business strategy planning should focus on a broader viewpoint that helps every stakeholder involved quickly gain an overview of the plan and its connection to the business.

10 Strategic Planning Templates to Use for Your Team

If every strategic plan has the same goals, you might think that most of them are nearly identical. You’d be surprised.

Much like project planning , different templates can lead to very different outcomes. That’s why it’s best to consider a few free strategic planning templates before selecting the one that works best for your business and situation. To help you get started, these are our 10 favorites to use for your next strategic plan.

It’s a basic template with potential power behind it. ClickUp’s Strategic Roadmap List Template helps you visualize how your organization can get through its strategic plam, with custom fields ranging from the duration of individual tasks to the progress of those tasks, their impact, and their ease of implementation.

Within ClickUp, you’ll be able to view your Strategic Roadmap as a progress view. But, once tasks and deadlines are assigned to individual tasks, you’ll also be able to see a timeline or even workload view to ensure continued progress. While it’s a primarily list-based template, we especially enjoy the Gantt chart as a way to see how the individual tasks interact with each other regarding the larger timeline.

If you’re thinking of your strategic planning as basically bridging the gap between your company’s present and desired future state, this is the template for you. It’s more complex than the list-based template mentioned above, providing you with a more nuanced strategic roadmap once built.

ClickUp’s Strategic Roadmap Timeline Template defaults to a Gantt chart with sections for individual departments. From there, you can view a progress board and outline your current capacity. Meanwhile, a number of custom fields help you better plan through each of these efforts:

• Completion %
• Expected Outcome
• Strategy Progress
• Team Members

It might not be the right template if you’re just getting started with strategic planning. But for experienced leaders looking to take that planning process to the next level, it’s just the right outline.

It’s simple but beautiful. ClickUp’s Grand Strategy Matrix Template allows you to build a four-quadrant view of the strategic environment surrounding your organization, with a framework designed to help you understand what the path to your organization’s future might look like.

How you get to that path, of course, is up to you. The quadrants can be used for a simple SWOT analysis or for more complex planning processes, like finding market growth niches and opportunities in a tight competitive environment. Some of these options are pre-built into the template, while others can be customized to match your exact marketing plan or whatever else you need your strategic planning process to be.

For the visual thinkers among us, this ClickUp’s Strategic Plan Whiteboard Template is a perfect choice. Above all, it’s a visual road map that easily shows not just what steps are necessary for strategic planning, but also how those steps can (and should) flow into each other in the context of the larger project.

Of course, you can still assign different tasks and stages to individual members of the team to keep responsibilities intact and obvious. But the template’s flowchart nature and whiteboard feel also mean you can seamlessly adjust the process as needed.

The chart’s color coding ensures that anyone working on it keeps a clear overview of what’s needed and when.

A strategic plan isn’t just relevant organization-wide. A solid business strategy is just as important for individual units, and this template shows just how those differences can manifest themselves.

Think of this ClickUp’s Strategic Marketing Plan Template as a more practical opportunity to plan your marketing efforts. The default list view is sorted by the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method, sorting tasks into defined overarching objectives for the larger marketing effort. 

But that’s only the beginning. Custom fields allow you to define the channels through which you’ll approach executing the plan, while the timeline view helps you keep track of progress. And of course, the Progress Board allows you to see how those stages you’ve defined ultimately lead to achieving your strategic goals.

Planning an event is hard work, and countless tasks will need need to be accomplished to ensure its success. A strategic plan template for that event, on the other hand, can keep a clear overview of the tasks needed and accomplished, and how everything connects to achieve core goals.

ClickUp’s Event Strategic Plan Template accomplishes that through a wide range of custom fields, from channel to budget, hashtags, the voice used, and more. It’s designed to plan multiple events at once, all overlapping to create an event-based strategy that helps to elevate your business or your marketing strategy.

Because of the complexities involved, we’re especially fond of the board-based Event Status view. This strategic plan template has a simple overview of where all events stand, and what still needs to be done.

Of course, the list and calendar-based views can also be helpful to get into some of the deeper nuances of event planning.

Strategic planning is not universally liked, in part because it tends toward the theoretical. Goals and tasks alike tend to be lofty for a true business strategy, focusing on the 30,000-foot view rather than the on-the-ground needs of the organization or your business partners.

That’s a major reason why we love ClickUp’s Action Plan Template . It’s a note-based system that folds all necessary tasks to move your strategic plan forward into three sections:

Within that structure, tasks are separated into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews to account for their varying complexities and timelines. The result is a simple overview of everything that needs to be done, which also does a great job highlighting existing successes and accomplished tasks for the entire team to see and celebrate. Now that’s a strategic plan.

What if we told you that you can build a strategic plan entirely in MS Word? That’s what this template seeks to accomplish, through easy-to-digest sections all designed to streamline the business strategy as much as possible:

• An executive summary that introduces the context and background of the strategic plan.
• A spot for your vision and mission statements to anchor your plan into your organization’s core being.
• A SWOT analysis to take an honest look at your organization and its environment (think vision statement)
• Business goals to define exactly what the strategic plan should accomplish
• A marketing plan that outlines the promotional side of the business strategy to hit those goals
• An operations plan that serves as the actionable road map toward achieving your goals
• Financial projections of the future with the goals for the business strategy (and business growth)
• The team that will be responsible for executing the strategic, marketing, and operational plan

Keep in mind that this plan is customizable to match your needs. It requires a bit more manual work than some of the other examples shared in this guide but can provide a nice overview of the plan you’re building.

If part of your strategic planning process includes presentations for stakeholders (and for most organizations, it does), why not go straight to the software in which those presentations will eventually happen?

This template is, at its core, a roadmap timeline similar to others we’ve discussed above. This business strategy template focuses on the individual milestones needed to get from goal setting all the way to execution. But it’s designed specifically for PowerPoint, with customization options that make it easy to dive in and tweak.

The download is free and easy, and customization only requires basic PowerPoint skills. The timeline is set to one year by default, so you might need to make some tweaks if your strategic plan spans multiple years across your vision statement.

MS Excel is not always user-friendly, but its cell-based build has enormous customization potential. It’s no surprise, then, that our final template on Excel is also one of the most comprehensive options in this guide for your business strategy needs.

The worksheet itself divides into three areas or tabs:

• Goal identification to identify key elements like goals for your organization through focused brainstorming.
• Goal setting, using the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) business strategy template for business goals.
• Action planning, converting those goals into tactics, and tracking the progress of those tactics towards attaining your goals.

Keep in mind that, thanks to its MS Excel nature, this is largely an internal planning document and not designed for external presentation. But within that context, the key elements of this business strategy template can be immensely helpful to get and keep your strategic planning on track.

Organizations: Whether it’s a non-profit, start-up, or multinational corporation, organizations across the board benefit from strategic planning. Such a plan offers a clear framework for decision-making, provides a roadmap for growth, identifies potential opportunities and risks, and facilitates better communication throughout the organization.

• Non-profit Organization Strategic Plan
• Startup Founders Strategic Plan
• Organizational Development Strategic Plan
• Healthcare Organization Strategic Plan

Leadership Teams: The leadership of any organization greatly benefits from strategic planning as it gives them a bird’s eye view of their organization’s existing state as well as a vision of where they intend to be. It helps identify key goals and objectives and set benchmarks to track progress.

• Team Leaders Strategic Plan
• Leadership Development Strategic Plan
• Community Leaders Strategic Plan
• Directors Strategic Plan

Supercharge Your Strategic Planning With ClickUp

It’s impossible to build a strategic plan in isolation. No matter the organization, chances are it’s a team effort. So why not expand that team to include the right tools? 

This is not an exaggeration: the right strategic planning template can make or break the process for you. Whether you’re trying to hit business objectives, run competitive analysis , or perform SWOT analysis, a clear outline lets easily build a plan that the entire organization can follow.

And when that template is free? All the better.

And here’s the best part: the software powering most of the templates we’ve shared above, ClickUp, is free to try as well. It’s a project management and productivity tool built for teams, which works out perfectly if that project is your next plan to create your overall business strategy. 

Ready to get started? Try ClickUp for free today.

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Template Highlights

• Download the strategic planning template as a Word document or PDF.
• In the Executive Summary section, provide a brief overview of the company, your mission statement, your key objectives, and your major partners.
• Under Market Research, describe your main clients, your status in the market, and your major competitors.
• In the Development section, you should describe your product and provide details on your delivery capabilities and system, your pricing model, and any critical suppliers.
• Next, in the Marketing Plan section, describe your strategy, your client breakdown, your positioning, and your advertising plan.
• Finally, perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.

Template Preview

Strategic planning.

STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLAN

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

COMPANY OVERVIEW

MISSION STATEMENT

KEY OBJECTIVES

KEY PARTNERS

DEVELOPMENT:

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

DELIVERY CAPABILITIES

PRICING MODEL

DELIVERY SYSTEM

CRITICAL ELEMENT SUPPLIERS

MARKET RESEARCH:

MARKET STATUS

COMPETITION

MARKETING PLAN:

CLIENT BREAKDOWN

POSITIONING

ADVERTISING

SWOT ANALYSIS

OPPORTUNITIES

Frequently Asked Questions

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Refine your machine, plot a map for the road ahead, and see how far you can go with collaboration at the heart of your strategy—with FigJam’s free strategic planning examples.

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Come together with your team to explore a strategic planning template designed to grow with you.

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What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is about outlining the pathways to success and determining what short or long term goals to aim for. A planning initiative may cover large topics like general mission statements, institutional goals, a new vision statement, and company-wide pivots. But strategic plans can also delve into the nitty-gritty, plotting out a singular aspect of a business or project.

Strategic planning steps include developing a position, prioritizing goals and roles, managing the execution of the plan, and reviewing the strategy post-facto. Click here if you want to learn more about the strategic planning process.

Why is the strategic planning process important?

It’s hard to find success if you don’t know what it looks like. Strategic planning frameworks allow organizations to understand and communicate precisely what they’re looking for. When bogged down in daily operations and looking toward the future, it’s helpful to refer to your fleshed-out strategic business plan template for clarity and perspective. Help teams stay focused on the overall goal, and assess timelines, financial projections, and action items as needed.

What is the purpose of strategic planning?

Strategic planning tools invite team members and stakeholders to exchange ideas freely and get organized around a unified vision for their business objectives.

With FigJam’s free strategic planning examples and templates, it’s easy to discover a shared business strategy and goals, visualize processes and outcomes, and tap into essential documentation. On our shared canvas, you can activate—and iterate—a strategic action plan that keeps your org motivated, efficient, and competitive within your market. Download the strategic action plan template to take your next step.

What's the best way to use this strategic plan template?

A strategic plan template provides a roadmap for team members to get from point A to point B. Use this template to identify a clear path forward, while keeping your brand's core values front and center. Follow these steps to use this template:

• Kickoff the strategic planning process by determining your team's vision statement.
• Add in your core values - this is the “why” that fuels your vision.
• Include key focus areas - what areas will need additional support and investment to support the overall vision statement? Consider conducting a competitive analysis or SWOT analysis to help inform your focus areas.
• Insert strategic goals that are clear, actionable, and measurable. These goals should align with the focus areas outlined above. Ensure goals have associated key performance indicators (KPIs) and deadlines.

Finalize the plan with action items for achieving your goals.

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Free Strategic Planning Templates for Excel and Word

When the leadership team defines an organization’s vision, they look toward the future and identify the goals and objectives they want to achieve. This is the start of strategic planning. The next step is establishing the sequence in which to realize those goals and objectives.

Once the vision is defined, then the practical work begins, and strategic planning templates can facilitate that work. ProjectManager is not only powerful project and portfolio management software but also has over 100 free project and portfolio management templates for Excel and Word, including these strategic planning templates.

Why Should You Use Strategic Planning Templates?

Strategic planning templates are useful tools for project management offices (PMOs) and portfolio and program managers who oversee multiple projects and ensure they’re aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. They cover everything involved in the strategic planning process, from defining the vision statement to creating a roadmap and more.

Using premade strategic planning templates is also helpful because there’s no busy work involved. All you have to do is add relevant details. Strategic planning templates are consistent, which helps when archiving strategic planning documentation. This makes it easier to reference those documents when needed and review them when creating a new long-term plan.

While strategic planning templates help get you started, once you execute the strategic plan, you’ll see their limitations. These are, after all, static documents that must be manually updated which can impact collaboration. Strategic plans are implemented across the organization and departments must work together, share resources and prioritize the common goal. In reality, strategic planning templates aren’t designed to be that dynamic.

Portfolio management software goes where strategic planning templates cannot. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software with powerful strategic roadmaps that collect all your projects and displays them on one Gantt chart. You can manage resources, track time and manage tasks for all your projects in one place. Our roadmap can be filtered by assignee, project manager or customer to help you make forecasts. You can view which projects are opened and who’s assigned to what tasks and highlight key metrics to keep stakeholders informed. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

If you’re not ready to upgrade yet, ProjectManager also has over 100 free project management templates for Excel and Word that can help you with every phase of your project and across multiple industries. Below, we’ve listed nine free strategic planning templates that can help you get started in reaching your strategic goals. Download them now.

1. Strategic Plan Template

Everything you need to outline your strategic plan is in this free strategic plan template for Word. When completed, you’ll have defined a strategic target and how to get the entire organization there. It will also show how the organization will track progress to ensure that its goals are met over a specific period.

Our free strategic plan template has a place to define your vision and mission statements, and even make a SWOT analysis to identify the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You can list your business goals, marketing and operational plans, financial projections and the team that will be tasked with meeting your strategic goals.

2. Vision Statement Template

Strategic planning templates are nothing if they’re not driven by a clear vision. An organization’s vision is defined and distributed on a document called the vision statement . It succinctly explains the meaning and purpose of the organization. This helps everyone understand the organization’s long-term goals.

Download our free vision statement template to kickstart the brainstorming that will generate a powerful vision statement for your organization. The vision statement template is made up of five steps, with each associated with a question, to walk you through the process of coming up with the right vision statement for your organization.

3. Strategy Roadmap Template

Once you have a vision, you know where you want to be over the next five or so years. Getting there requires a strategy roadmap , which is a tool that visualizes the major phases in your long-term plan to achieve your vision. This is one of the more important strategic planning templates in that it helps you make important decisions in terms of strategy, resource allocation and more.

Using our free strategy roadmap template for Excel gives you a high-level overview of the project or multiple projects you’ll be managing. On the left-hand side, a spreadsheet lists your tasks, start and end dates, including duration. Once those are imputed, they automatically populate the horizontal bar chart to the right. You can color-code the timeline to make it easier to distinguish different projects or phases.

4. Strategy Map Template

A strategy map is another strategic planning template that’s also a visual tool. It’s used to show the cause-and-effect of an organization’s strategic objectives by breaking them into four perspectives: strategic, financial, customer and business process. The strategy map template then communicates these objectives to the departments in an organization.

Our free strategy map template for Excel is customizable so you can identify your key objectives and place them appropriately across the four perspectives, with arrows showing the cause-and-effect relationships between them. This makes it clear how one objective from one perspective will influence the other objects from different perspectives.

5. SWOT Analysis Template

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It’s an analytic tool that organizations use to assess their competitive position and develop long-term planning strategies. This makes it an ideal addition to your strategic planning templates.

Our free SWOT analysis template for Word is a useful strategic planning template as it’s divided into four quadrants and four descriptors. Strengths are positive and internal to an organization, while weaknesses are negative and internal. Opportunities are positive, but external, while threats are negative and external. Using the template helps you sort through this data to inform your strategic plan.

6. Smart Goals Template

When using strategic planning templates, the first thing you need to define are goals. But those goals should be SMART , as in specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Using our free smart goals template for Word will help ensure you can achieve your long-term goals.

Our SMART goals template is a simple, but powerful tool for defining goals. It’s broken up into the five categories of SMART goals. For each, there are a series of questions to answer. This will lead you to the right goals for your organization and its business environment.

7. Organizational Chart Template

Once you have all your strategic planning templates filled out and you’re ready to implement the plan , there’s one last thing you need to do; define the internal structure of your organization. Creating a visual flowchart clarifies who has power over what and who to report or request guidance from.

Our free organizational chart template for Excel will help your organization run better, which is essential if you want to reach your long-term goals. The tree diagram design makes it easy to see department heads and those who report under them.

8. Action Plan Template

A strategic goal is just an idea until it’s executed. The ability to turn those goals into actionable tasks requires an action plan , which is a strategic planning template that lists tasks, duration and costs all in one document.

Our free action plan template for Excel helps you organize tasks and subtasks by phase and who’s assigned to them. In the timeline section, add start and end dates. Be sure to include the materials required to execute those tasks and their associated costs.

9. Resource Plan Template

Getting everyone up to speed on strategic plans is one thing, scheduling their work is another. That’s why having a resource plan is critical when assembling your strategic planning templates. Using our free resource plan template for Excel helps you schedule your resources.

The template has a column to list your resources and another to identify their department and the total number of hours assigned to each resource, including their rate and total cost. The other part of the template is a weekly calendar that allows you to map when you need your resources.

How ProjectManager Helps With Strategic Planning

Strategic planning templates are helpful. They can organize your thoughts and focus ideas, but they fall short when it comes to planning, managing and tracking your projects. They can’t track details in real time and pull you away from more important work as you manually update each strategic planning template. Plus, they’re not collaborative. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software that helps you with strategic planning and monitoring its execution in real time to keep you on track to meet your long-term goals.

Manage Resources and Labor Costs

When you onboard your team to our software, you can set their availability, including PTO, vacation and even global holidays for remote workers. This makes it easy to assign them work. Then toggle over to the workload chart , which is color-coded to make it easy to see your team’s workload. If some are overallocated, just balance their workload right from the chart. Our secure timesheets streamline payroll but also allow you to track labor costs and keep to your budget. You can also see how far each team member is in completing their work.

Track the Progress and Costs of Strategic Initiatives

You can track your resources, costs, time and more with our real-time portfolio dashboards. They give you an overview of your projects, like having a status report whenever you want one. Our project and portfolio dashboards automatically collect live data and display it on easy-to-read graphs and charts. There’s no time-consuming and complicated setup as with lightweight alternatives. If you want more details, use our customizable reports , which filter data to show only what you want to see. They can also be shared to keep stakeholders informed.

Creating action plans to reach your strategic goals can be done on our robust Gantt charts or roadmaps, but teams across different departments are going to need different tools to execute their tasks. Our software has multiple project views, from the visual workflow of kanban boards to task lists, sheet and calendar views. Teams can work how they want. All project views update together so everyone is always working on the same page.

ProjectManager is online project and portfolio management software that connects teams whether they’re in the office, in the field or anywhere in the world. They can share files, comment at the task level and stay updated with email and in-app notifications. Join teams at Avis, Nestle and Siemens who use our software to deliver successful projects. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

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Free Strategic Plan Template

Organizing your business strategies can help you accomplish long- and short-term goals. AchieveIt helps organizations create efficient, achievable plans. Insert your information and start working on your objectives immediately with our template. Follow our strategic plan template to outline and accomplish any goal you want.

The Goal of This Strategic Planning Template

Templates help  guide your strategic planning process . Using a template ensures you hit all significant points in your plan and address any concerns from the beginning. You can accurately assess your organization’s needs and input that information to create a step-by-step plan.

Whether or not you have experience with strategic planning, you can use a template to get ahead. When you fill out our template, you receive a tool to discuss with your peers and the AchieveIt team. From there, you can start working on your reflection and evaluation as the plan progresses.

BONUS: See your plan in action in the AchieveIt platform!

If you want to increase the success of your plan, one of our execution experts will be happy to give you a custom walkthrough using your plan details.

Just email [email protected] with an attached copy of this template or make reference of this template after filling out a form , and we’ll get you scheduled right away.

DOWNLOAD MY TEMPLATE

How to Use This Strategic Planning Template

We crafted this template to be the basis for your organization’s strategic plan. Every group is different, so your plan might have unique features. Your template provides a starting point to craft the ideal structure for your organization.

Follow these tips to use this plan effectively:

1. Review and Update the Plan Structure

To start, review our recommendations and enter the level names to match your organization. Match your organization’s vocabulary and references as needed to make sure everything translates.

2. Identify Strategic Themes

When you create goals for the month or year, identify any themes and commonalities between them. We have samples to showcase five themes, but you can adjust accordingly if you have more than five.

3. Create Goals, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics

Underneath these themes, you will have your individual goals and objectives. We recommend breaking down each goal into objectives, strategies, and tactics. Involve your team in planning to ensure everyone is on the same page.

4. Ensure Your Plan Is Structured for Success

Each of your goals should have an owner and a timeline. To improve your overall outcomes, ensure there is someone responsible for each goal and a clear timeline for when the goal should end. Read our article on  structuring your plan for execution  and find out what you need to prepare.

5. Make It Measurable

You should have actionable items to measure your goal. Find a way to measure success that works for each one, whether by revenue, leads, or another indicator. When you quantify your success, you can see your plan in action and determine how well the goal is working.

6. Ensure Alignment

For each goal, make sure the objectives and tactics underneath support the desired outcome. If you want to increase sales, focus on implementing marketing techniques or devoting energy to your sales staff. Your tactics are smaller goals you can work on along the way to your larger objective.

7. Create a Process for Execution

Now that you have an outline for how you’ll approach your plan, be sure you can execute your goals accordingly. Have a plan to track each goal and its progress along the way. AchieveIt has tools to help with plan execution and strategy at any point in time.

Tips for Seeing Your Strategic Plan in Action

After completing your template, you may want to learn how to see your plan in action. Your template may change to accommodate your growth as you progress through the program. We can help you gauge your plan and implement it into your organization’s procedures.

To measure your success, bring your plan to life with AchieveIt:

• Build and implement a best-practice strategic plan
• Collect updates:  AchieveIt software automatically collects updates at your preferred intervals.
• Keep an eye on due dates
• Increase visibility : Bring all your initiatives and plans into one dashboard that you can easily monitor.
• Align cross-organization content : Combine your departments and groups to monitor their individual impact and encourage collaboration.
• Improve team accountability:  Have access to all accountability details and see who is doing what at any time.
• Drive results

Get Started With Your Strategic Plan

Strategic planning gives your organization a sense of direction. You can stay on top of changes and developments and be prepared if any issues arise. With a reliable plan, you can keep your organization on track toward its goals.

Building up your programs and systems takes time and effort. Implementing a strategy can make it easier to get ahead and make your business stronger overall. You can manage multiple tasks with one convenient system.

To get started with AchieveIt, download our free template and see how we can streamline your strategic planning.

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More Like this

How to write a strategic plan.

How do you know if you have a complete strategic plan? A complete strategic plan has several components, but the various parts fall into three categories. Following our step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to write a strategic plan quickly.

Not to oversimplify how to write a strategic plan, but by placing all the parts of a strategic plan into three areas or categories of focus, you can see how the pieces fit together.

The three pieces of the puzzle are:

Where are we now?

Where are we going?

• How will we get there?

Get the Free Guide to Build Your Strategic Objectives (with Examples!)

Each part has certain elements to show you how and where things fit. Our 4-Phase Guide to Strategic Planning lays out each step of the planning process. You can also watch our video, The Complete Strategic Planning Checklist” for a brief overview.

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Video Transcript – The Complete Strategic Plan

Hi everyone, its Erica Olsen from OnStrategy. Welcome to today’s whiteboard video on “How do you know if you have a complete strategic plan?”

As you would expect from us, we’re going to make that as easy as possible and give you a checklist — and a checklist not only for a complete plan — but for an awesome plan. So, let’s jump in.

First things first, you need a couple of things that set your strategic direction: your mission statement, which tells us why you exist, your reason for being, and your vision statement of where you’re going. You’ve heard me say it a million times, strategic plans are all about going to a place that you are not today. And your vision statement answers that. We often lump values in this area: mission, vision, and values, because it sounds good.

But I would say that a strategic plan does not have to have values if you don’t have them already articulated. And the only reason for that is because I would highly recommend that you take a values process and run that separately from a strategic planning process, because there’s a lot of work there. And it deserves its own time and attention. And if you have your values, they should go in here if you don’t put a placeholder.

So then we move to strategy. In order to articulate your strategy, you’ve got to understand where you are today. And we use a trusty tool that is a SWOT–Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. So once you have a clear understanding of where you are today, and where the opportunities are for growth, you can build out the strategy areas of your plan, which look like this: your strategic goals.

Those are the four, or five, or six big areas of focus that make up the framework of your plan that are super important. Everything rises and falls here–your vision connects to your goals and your goals connect your objectives.

Also, in your strategy is your org-wide strategies or your organizational-wide strategies. Those are the differentiation statements, or how you’re different. Strategy is about being unique. And that’s what that statement does for you.

And then of course, clarifying where are we going to play? How are we going to win? That’s your growth strategy. Strategic plans have got to have a growth section. That’s your competitive advantages and your customer segments. So, once you have all that articulated, we can move to your annual plan, which looks like organization-wide objectives.

Those are your SMART objectives. They should be measurable, time bound, accountable, all that good stuff. And each initiative should have at least one or two quarterly action items to make sure that you can really move them in to execution. And of course, no good plan is done unless you’re clear about how you’re going to measure your success–key performance indicators or KPIs. So with that, there’s your checklist for a complete and awesome strategic plan.

Hit the like button if you like our content, and please subscribe to our channel. We’re dropping videos every Friday. Happy strategizing.

Plan Writing Step 1: Establish Your Strategic Foundation

The first step in any business strategy or organizational strategy is to start by establishing or confirming your strategic foundation – in simple terms, we mean clearly articulating why your organization exists and how you expect your team to behave (Mission and Core values). This phase of the strategic planning process creates the foundation of your strategic plan as it tells you and the rest of your organization what your starting point is and why you generally exist (your core purpose or mission).

After setting up the foundation, you can determine where you’re going or hope to go in the future and exactly how you will get there by steering your organization in the right direction.

As you think about where your organization is now, you want to look at the foundational elements of your organization’s purpose and culture (mission + values) and assess your organization’s current state (SWOT and competitive advantages).

This portion of strategic planning is designed to outline the core foundation of your organization, like why you exist and how you behave, while looking at the internal and external factors that will influence your planning elements. Below is a quick overview of those elements, which include a breakdown of your mission statement, core values, and SWOT analysis.

Who are we, and how do we behave?

Mission statement.

The mission describes your organization’s purpose – the purpose for which you were founded and why you exist.

Some mission statements include the business of the organization. Others explain what products or services they produce or the customers they serve. Does your mission statement say what you do? Why does your organization exist?

Core Values:

This clarifies what you believe and how you expect your team to behave.

Three questions to ask to clarify your core values include:

• What are the core values and beliefs of your organization?
• What values and beliefs guide your daily interactions?
• What are you and your people committed to?

While a values statement is foundational to your overall strategy, the values process can be run separately from the strategic planning process as it needs its own time and attention. Your value statements are the barometer to determine whether you are conducting your business in a way that stays true to your organization’s purpose.

Video Transcript – Overview of the Strategic Planning Process

Hi, my name is Erica Olsen. Today’s whiteboard video is an overview of the strategic planning process. Instead of going through a bullet pointed list, we’ll do it in the form of an illustration.

To orient ourselves, I want to outline the four phases of the process over here: assess, design, build, and manage. The phases of planning include assessing, designing, and building, and we spend a couple of months per year doing that.

We spend the rest of the year managing the performance and the execution of our plan. Oftentimes, we get into execution, and we’re not exactly realizing the results that we want. In which case, we go back into some parts of the planning process, and sort of rinse and repeat. Today’s video is going through the whole process, but sometimes you just make big pieces of it. So, let’s jump in.

Great strategic plans start with understanding where we are today–assessing the current state– point A. We do that by gathering an external perspective, opportunities and threats, and an internal perspective, strengths, and weaknesses. And we summarize all that information and do a SWOT analysis. And as a little Asterix, we have detailed whiteboard videos on each point today. So, if you need to dig deeper, check those out.

So, once we’re clear about where we are today, we can move into the second part of our process, which is designing the strategy, starting with our mission statement. Our mission statement is a square here because great mission statements tell us what’s in and what’s out. Why do we exist as an organization, what’s our core purpose, and then by default, what’s not. With clarity on our mission, we can move to casting our vision or our future state.

Strategic plans are all about moving organizations from where we are today to where we want to be in the future. And that’s what our vision statement does for us. It tells us where we want to go.

The rest of our plan builds a roadmap from today to tomorrow. Starting with a couple of things that help us answer, “How will we succeed?” our competitive advantages, and our long-term, organization-wide strategies. These come in different names, but let’s just use the analogy and the visual to keep us grounded.

These help as guides. They act as an umbrella over our entire plan to make sure that we’re building a plan that we can succeed and be successful and be competitive with. So, with that guideline in place, we can move to building our framework–our long-term strategic objectives. Again, there are different names for this, but let’s just use that for today. I like to see them in four categories because we want a holistic framework. We want to make sure that our plan covers our financial perspective, our customer perspective, our operational and internal perspective, and our people perspective.

Less than six strategic objectives is a pretty good idea when you’re looking at your framework because we’re going to cascade the rest of the plan from these. From there, we’re ready to move into the next phase, which is building our plan.

That looks like starting with our goals, or our corporate goals. And we’re using the word ‘goals’ to articulate quantifiable, outcome-based statements. Where do you want to be in year one, and year two, and year three? And most of the time, we use key performance indicators to help guide us along the way.

So, we like our corporate goals. And again, we’re going to cascade from our strategic objectives. We like our corporate goals to be SMART. SMART is a great acronym to make sure that you have good, quantifiable, outcome-based goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

Once we have our corporate goals in place, a couple per each long-term, strategic objective, we’re ready to move into annual operating plans. And that looks like building goals and cascading into each level of the organization. So that looks like corporate goals being cascaded into department goals, and department goals being cascaded into individual, contributor goals.

Once we’ve cascaded it down that far, we have a plan, and we’re done with the third phase. So now we have a plan. Now what? We want to move into managing execution because nobody wants to build a plan that sits on a shelf. So, there are three things you need to have in place to effectively execute.

Number one: people. You need to make sure that every person in your organization has an individual action plan that expresses ownership and accountability for what they need to get done by when. And with that, that matters because all the rest of this is just on paper if we’re not clear about that very specific piece.

The second thing is we need to make sure that we have a system in place to track and manage performance. A software system, spreadsheets, whatever it looks like, you’re going to gather a lot of data on a monthly, or quarterly and annual basis, you need a place to put that, and everybody needs to be working on the same system.

The third thing is process. You need to schedule at least monthly, or quarterly reviews of your performance because without that review, all the rest of this is just again, good ideas on paper.

So, with that, that’s an overview of the strategic planning process. Subscribe to our channel. Happy strategizing.

Plan Writing Step 2: Conduct a Current State Assessment

As you think about where your organization is now, you want to look at the foundational elements of your organization’s purpose and culture (mission + values) and assess your organization’s current state (SWOT and competitive advantages).

This portion of strategic planning is designed to outline the core foundation of your organization, like why you exist and how you behave, while looking at the internal and external factors that will influence your planning elements. Below is a quick overview of those elements, which include a breakdown of your mission statement, core values, SWOT analysis, and business objectives..

When assessing your current position, you must conduct a thorough internal and external analysis of your organization. This includes assessing two major things:

• How well you are meeting your customer and market needs.
• How well do your internal processes and employees rate in terms of efficiency and satisfaction?

It may be tempting to skip this step or feel like you know where your organization stands and can make do with a less formal process, but this is not the case. Conducting a formal internal/external analysis via a SWOT, PESTLE , market analysis, or even employee surveys will help you lay the groundwork for your strategic plan.

Successful attributes of an internal and external analysis:

• Your organization’s strengths
• Weaknesses for your organization to improve upon
• A clearly defined competitive advantage
• Market opportunities to pursue
• An understanding of your competitor’s competitive advantages
• Strategic themes that serve as the framework of your plan

SWOT is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These elements are crucial in assessing your strategic position within your organization. You want to build on your organization’s strengths, shore up the weaknesses, capitalize on the opportunities, and recognize the threats.

The SWOT can also be used as a forward-looking tool to determine where you want to go, as it allows you to see where your opportunities or threats may be in the future. These can help you pinpoint what some of your growth opportunities are.

Plan Writing Step 3: Create Your Vision of the Future

The elements of the question “Where are we going?” help you answer other questions such as “What will my organization look like in the future?”, “Where are we headed?”, and “What is my vision of the future I want to create for my company?” Because the future is hard to predict, you can have fun imagining what it may look like. The following elements help you define the future for your business:

Vision Statement

Your organization’s vision statement is the articulation of what your organization’s future makeup will be and where the organization is headed. What will your organization look like in 5 to 10 years from now? What are your company’s goals that you seek to accomplish?

It’s important that your organization’s vision always remains relevant and clear. We recommend a vision that is big, bold, and audacious—like “All children achieve their full potential” from Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.

A vision statement like this would probably be true and relevant to the organization for its entirety. A vision statement may only need to change if the organization is making big moves or pivoting to address major shifts in the market or industry.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage

A sustainable competitive advantage explains what you are best at compared to your competitors. Each company strives to create an advantage that continues to be competitive over time. What can you be best at? What is your uniqueness? What can your organization potentially do better than any other organization?

Growth Strategy

Strategy is ultimately about being unique. It is about playing to the strengths that make your organization different from the others in your market. It establishes a way to match your organization’s strengths with market opportunities so that your organization comes to mind when your customer has a need.

This section explains how you travel to your final destination. Does your strategy match your strengths in a way that provides value to your customers? Does it build an organizational reputation and recognizable industry position?

Your growth strategy should clarify:

• Where are we going to play?
• How are we going to win?

Growth strategies are where your competitive advantages and your customer segments come into play. Once you have all that articulated, you can move to your annual plan, which looks like organization-wide objectives.

Plan Writing Step 4: Build Your Plan

How will we achieve our vision with action?

Strategic objectives are the steps that bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be. They also connect your big, bold vision to the annual goals you need to achieve it and establish the boundaries for your organization’s focus.

Strategic Objectives

Knowing how you’ll reach your vision is the meat of your strategic plan, and it’s also the most time consuming. The reason it takes so much time to develop your strategic priorities is because there are a number of routes from your current position to your vision. Picking the right one determines how quickly or slowly you’ll get to your final destination.

Strategic objectives are long-term, continuous strategic areas that help you connect your growth strategy and annual actions to your long-term vision of success. Strategic planning with holistic objectives encompasses four areas:

• Operational

Ask yourself what the key activities within these four areas are that you need to perform in order to achieve your vision.

It’s also important to separate your strategic objectives from your day-to-day operational objectives. They almost act like ‘mini vision statements’ as they support the overall vision of success by focusing on manageable focus areas.

Ultimately, your strategic objectives are not a mishmash of department goals. Instead, they embody the company-wide direction. They are what drive the direction and growth.

It is recommended to have at least four to six strategic objectives. They are your areas of focus that create the framework for your plan, and this should stem from your vision. Your vision connects your goals, and your goals connect your objectives. Your objectives should be SMART–specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Short-term Goals/Priorities/Initiatives

Short-term strategic goals convert your strategic objectives into specific performance targets. You can use goals, priorities, or initiatives interchangeably. Here, the term ‘goals’ defines short-term action. Effective goals clearly state:

• What you want to accomplish.
• When you want to accomplish it.
• How you’re going to accomplish it.
• Who is going to be responsible.

Each goal should be specific and measurable:

• What are the 1- to 3-year goals you’re trying to achieve to reach your vision?
• What are your specific, measurable, and realistic targets of accomplishment?

Within your strategic plan, you should set milestones to measure achievement and motivate your team. Setting milestones also sets clear expectations of who is in charge of specific tasks and results.

Additionally, milestones help teams determine whether resource allocations serve to assess risks or upcoming obstacles. Strategic plans are iterative rather than sequential, so setting milestones can allow your plan to be more adaptive to address changes in the market rather than changing the overall strategic goals.

Action Items

Action items are plans that set specific actions that lead to implementing your goals. They include start and end dates and appoint a person responsible. Are your action items comprehensive enough to achieve your goals?

KPIs and Scorecards

A scorecard measures and manages your strategic plan. Each goal should have some form of measurement, whether that is through key performance indicators (KPIs) or some other method of measurement. What are the key metrics and KPIs you need to track to monitor whether you’re achieving your mission? Pick 5 to 10 goal-related measures you can use to track the progress of your plan and plug them into your scorecard.

In executing the plan, identify issues that surround the management and monitoring of the plan and how the plan is communicated and supported throughout your entire organization. How committed are you to implementing the plan to move your organization forward? Will you commit money, resources, and time to support the plan?

As you’ve been going through the planning and assessment phase of your strategic plan, you’ve hopefully thought of the resources needed to achieve this, including team members who will play a crucial role in executing the plan. Clear communication and support from your entire organization are essential for the successful execution of your strategic plan.

Before you begin executing your plan, it is essential to ensure that you have your resource allocation fully ironed out. This will prevent the possibility of ‘scope creep’ and keep you and your team aligned on your needs.

Another consideration for successful strategic plan implementation is ensuring stakeholder and employee buy-in. Stakeholder buy-in is crucial for any strategic plan.

• Identify your key stakeholders.
• Make sure you and your team understand everyone’s role in the process.
• Establish communication channels.
• Offer active listening and transparency.
• Celebrate the milestones.

However, buy-in really begins before the execution of your plan. If you’re waiting until it’s time for them to act on the plan before you consider whether they are bought in, then it’s a little late in the game. If you aren’t giving your team a voice in the planning and analysis stage and getting their input on the issues your organization faces, it will be harder to get them to buy-in to the implementation stage.

Revisiting and Refining your Strategic Plan

As stated before, the strategic planning process is iterative. It won’t always be a linear process with linear progress and achievements. This is why regularly revisiting your plan and making adjustments as needed is essential. Monitoring the pulse of your strategic plan is something that can be done by implementing a regular review cycle quarterly and revisiting your annual goals at the beginning of each fiscal year to determine what is working and what isn’t.

PS – Strategic planning is best supported by an agile review process.

We’ve covered this extensively, but the most successful strategic planning processes are supported by a consistent, rigorous review process where teams review performance monthly, review and refresh the plan quarterly, and then do a bigger plan refresh annually.

Check out our agile strategy guide here.

Challenges in Strategic Planning

The strategic planning process can be very involved and complex. It is definitely not a quick fix and it is not a one person job. Some common issues that many organizations come across in the planning and execution stages of their plans can be your team’s resistance to change, misalignment of resources, setting unrealistic goals, or a failure to adapt to external market shifts. However, with proper strategic thinking, strategy execution, and alignment with key stakeholders, these challenges can be overcome.

These challenges can be overcome by a consistent and open method of communication, a regular review process where you’re discussing your success and the things that may hinder it and fostering a culture of adaptability and ownership of your organization’s goals and accomplishments.

12 Principles to maintain your momentum during a planning and execution process:

• Make sure you have CEO buy-in to your plan and process.
• One-page plans are amazing executive summaries for your plan.
• Create a “final plan” when you move to execution. But adapt it quarterly as needed.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning.
• Empower your decision-makers.
• Celebrate the small successes.
• Encourage feedback.
• Seek internal and external feedback.
• Don’t be afraid to adapt.
• Practice open communication.
• Don’t get tangled up in the business-as-usual tasks.
• Keep your eye on the big picture.

28 Comments

Very useful to me and for my organization as formulation of strategic plans is my job

A good introduction

Very good , your direction make an easy for me to di this things.thanks

I am going to write a strategic plan, but not before I read this!

Very resourceful not only for my exams but for my work as well. Thanks.

Good information, but you might want to check the typos.

Thanx,i can now rearrange and plan my life and carrier.

Excellent and simple answer to plan, and deliver a strategy to my business

The information is so ressourcefull. Am now a real strategic planner. Thanks.

Critical tool for advancing the management of my enterprises towards attaining sustainable ,growth projections.

IS BEEN REALLY HELPFUL THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Eeh! Its Gud information. I will use it for my LIFE strategic PLAN.

Though it was my first time to visit this site, it was very good and opened up mind more especially on what I didn’t know and thus will give it a closure look to build my confident and more knowledge

Thank you Kristin,

This has helped me to design my strategic plan well for my on coming NGO after a struggle with the old version which was not giving me a lead of how to fit in information in their right places.

I agree other than I’m missing the question “What might prevent us from coming there?”

hi fine can yaou help me about nutrition roadmap models

Hi, thank you for the helps. I am not familiar of strategic planning and this article is a good help.

now i know, i will write my strategic plan now. am grateful to the organizers this article.

Very informative. This is a good reference. Thank you.

thank you for sharing.. very clear explanation

Thanks Erica because of strong and brief text about strategy.i am strategic planner in petroleum industries health organization in Iran.

Thanks for three points for stategy .

very Nice..This article Helped me alott. Please keep doing this.Inspiration and guidence is very importatnt for someone to reach to his destination.And i think you are doing a good job. 🙂

Fantastic information, just in line with my outline. Thank you

Good information. However, I think this strategic plan process was designed for private sector more than any other sector!

I need to write a strat for the Africa expansion for a cinema group . Any ideas .

it’s really good and good introduction, thanks

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Simple Strategic Plan Template

What is a Simple Strategic Plan?

A simple strategic plan outlines the main objectives and goals of a business or organization. It will cover the focus areas that need to be addressed, the objectives that will be achieved through these focus areas, the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure success, and the projects or actions that will be implemented to achieve the KPIs. The goal of a simple strategic plan is to help businesses and organizations achieve their objectives in an efficient and organized manner.

What's included in this Simple Strategic Plan template?

• 3 focus areas
• 6 objectives

Each focus area has its own objectives, projects, and KPIs to ensure that the strategy is comprehensive and effective.

Who is the Simple Strategic Plan template for?

The Simple Strategic Plan Template is designed to help businesses of all sizes and industries create a plan to achieve their strategic objectives. This template can be used by startups, large companies, and everyone in between. It is a comprehensive template that will help organizations define their focus areas, set measurable objectives and KPIs, and develop actionable projects to help them achieve their desired outcomes.

1. Define clear examples of your focus areas

A focus area is a broad topic that your organization wants to address in order to achieve its strategic objectives. Examples of focus areas could include improving customer satisfaction, increasing sales, improving operational efficiency, and more. It is important to define clear examples of your focus areas so that you can set measurable objectives and KPIs to help you achieve your desired outcomes.

2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area

Objectives are the specific goals that your organization wants to achieve in order to fulfill the focus area. These objectives should be measurable and achievable. Examples could include increasing customer retention or improving customer service response times.

3. Set measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the metrics used to measure the success of a particular objective. They should be measurable, achievable, and relevant to the objective. Examples could include increasing customer retention rate from 15% to 20%, or decreasing customer service response time from 3 hours to 1 hour.

4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs

Projects or actions are the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the KPIs. Examples could include offering personalized customer service, implementing automated customer service tools, promoting new products online, and creating loyalty programs.

5. Utilize Cascade Strategy Execution Platform to see faster results from your strategy

Cascade Strategy Execution Platform is an innovative strategy execution platform that helps organizations achieve their strategic objectives faster and with greater accuracy. By utilizing Cascade, organizations can get real-time visibility into the progress of their strategic initiatives, measure the success of their KPIs, and gain actionable insights to improve their strategic performance.

Everything you need to deliver your plans, manage strategy and report progress.

• Customizable plan structure
• Automated and on-demand progress reports
• Save time with AI features

Centralize, analyze and visualize your performance data. Align performance measures with plans.

• Centralized performance data
• Scorecards and interactive dashboards
• Slice and dice for new insights

Manage, deliver, and communicate projects. Align projects with plans for end-to-end visibility and reporting.

• Gantt view of projects, tasks and dependencies
• Interactive maps and dashboards
• Plan alignment and reporting

Share your strategy story with external stakeholders via customizable public dashboards.

• Progress dashboards with roll-up reporting
• Matched to your branding
• Fully ADA Compliant

Strategy and Performance Management Integrations Learn More

Free Strategic Plan Template

Whether you’re looking to develop your first strategic plan, or your existing plan is lacking the structure it needs to truly be successful, our free strategic plan template is here to help! Get your strategic plan, actions, and performance measures into a usable, printable format for your jurisdiction.

A road map to guide your planning

Designed to meet the unique needs of the public sector, we have included a strategic planning guide that provides a road map for developing a plan that is action and results oriented. The stages include:

• Prepare to plan
• Create the plan
• Execute the plan

As you complete each step, the strategic plan template provides a place to capture your decisions and prepare for the next steps.

A strategic plan template to organize your planning

The template ensures your plan is:

• Clearly structured and easy to understand
• Comprehensive and complete
• Ready to communicate alignment and accountability to your teams

You can use this government strategic plan template to create and publish your plan, or simply use it as a worksheet to facilitate your planning process. Feel free to make any changes to the number of goals, strategies and actions to suit your needs. This template is unlocked to provide you with the most flexibility.

The best news is that when you’re ready to use Envisio to develop and track your plan , monitor performance , and share the results with the public, it will already be in the most effective format!

Yes, I want the template

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Strategic Plan Templates

Strategic plan templates are navigational compasses for organizational success. Chart your course, align goals, and steer towards a future filled with purpose and achievement.

Other plan templates

• Succession planning
• Professional development
• Communication
• Corrective action
• Performance improvement
• Project communication
• Implementation
• Ux research
• Classroom management
• Operational
• Small business
• Procurement

Popular template categories

• Infographics
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• White papers
• Letterheads
• Newsletters
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• Human resources
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• Price lists
• Album covers
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• See All Templates

5 top strategic planning tools and frameworks [templates & examples]

If you want homemade bread, you need access to the right appliances and ingredients. And if your strategic plan is a loaf of sourdough, your strategic planning tools are the measuring spoons, the framework is the recipe, and your model is the oven. Each component works together to create the desired result.

Whether it’s baking fresh bread or increasing revenue or customer satisfaction, all goals take strategic planning initiatives — and in some cases, all-purpose flour — to accomplish. Discover some of the most popular frameworks and five of our favorite strategic planning tools to achieve organizational success.

What is strategic planning?

The goal of developing a strategic plan is to communicate where your organization wants to go and determine what each team member needs to do to help get it there. Strategic planning helps your organization develop and document action items for carrying out the company vision and achieving business goals. 

While there are several models that can help you determine opportunities, priorities, and overall objectives, most strategic planning processes follow five general steps:

• Identify your organization’s vision
• Assess your current internal and external environments
• Outline goals
• Determine stakeholder responsibilities
• Measure and assess outcomes

Regardless of the process you choose, each of these steps will lead to the next, allowing you to build out a comprehensive strategic plan.

Types of strategic planning frameworks

Strategic planning frameworks help teams with brainstorming in order to create specific goals from an overall vision. Frameworks are essentially roadmaps to take teams from ideas to actions. You don’t necessarily need to use a framework within a model — just like you don’t necessarily need to follow a recipe to bake a loaf of bread — but it helps you produce the best outcome. And don’t feel limited to using only one framework within a particular model.

Although it’s not a complete list, the frameworks listed below are some of the most commonly used.

Balanced scorecard

Created by Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton, the balanced scorecard is designed for organizations that want to focus on their business as a whole, rather than solely on financial performance. It helps give leadership teams a look at how their operations are performing, particularly within quick timelines.

When using the balanced scorecard, you’ll reference four factors to set goals and assess performance:

• Customers or clients: How your users perceive your business
• Internal processes: Your organization’s efficiency when developing quality products or services
• Organizational capacity: Your company culture and the ways in which your business can improve and grow
• Financial capacity: Your organization’s potential profitability and the effectiveness of resource allocation

Once you determine where your organization stands with regard to the factors above, you can develop specific goals, measurable objectives, and the steps you’ll need to take to achieve these.

Objectives and key results (OKR)

Objectives and key results (OKR) is a straightforward framework used to translate overarching business goals into specific measurable objectives. It helps you define:

• Objectives: Identify three to five time-bound goals you want to achieve.
• Key results: Determine three to five quantitative outcomes per objective.

The OKR framework helps your team build connections between their individual contributions and your company’s success. Your team should shoot for a 70% key result success rate . If they’re hitting 100% right out of the gate, your organization’s goals weren’t ambitious enough.

Related: OKRs vs. KPIs: What’s the difference?

SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis is a strategic framework that helps you identify your organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. You should use the SWOT framework at the beginning of your strategic planning process to align stakeholders and provide a common lens through which to view your company’s current position.

List your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the four quadrants of a 2x2 box. Once outlined, your team can seek connections between quadrants that will inform your strategy. The goal of the SWOT framework is to help you create a strategy that takes advantage of growth opportunities but also prepares for worst-case scenarios.

PEST or PESTLE analysis

A PEST analysis is a strategic framework that helps teams analyze external political, economic, sociocultural, and technological factors that could impact your business goals. It could also be modified to include legal and environmental elements (PESTLE).

Like a SWOT analysis, considering each factor of PEST or PESTLE within your industry environment gives your team advanced warning about any significant or immediate threats to your organizational goals. It also enables teams to pinpoint business opportunities within each of the framework’s factors.

Gap analysis

The gap analysis framework should be used to compare where your organization currently stands with where you want it to be and help you understand how to bridge the gap between the two. 

With the gap analysis framework — also called the strategic planning gap, need assessment, or need-gap analysis — you’ll be able to determine weak points and root causes (or potential causes) of performance issues by comparing what you’re currently doing with what you intend to do. It helps you identify internal organizational deficiencies and create a plan that addresses them.

VRIO framework

The VRIO framework helps you identify your organization’s competitive advantages and is composed of four elements:

• Value: Do your resources help increase revenue or decrease costs, resulting in business value?
• Rarity: Is there a lot of competition in the market for your resources? Are other companies able to create your products and services using these resources?
• Imitability: Could a competing organization copy your products and services easily?
• Organization: Does your organization have the right systems in place to capitalize on your resources?

By analyzing these elements, you’ll be able to refine your organization’s vision and create a plan that helps you meet your customers’ needs.

Porter’s Five Forces

Developed in 1979 by Michael Porter, the Five Forces framework helps you identify and understand the factors that put competitive pressure on your organization.

The five forces are:

• Bargaining power of buyers: If the same products and services are offered elsewhere with minimal differences in quality, consumers will have the power to influence pricing.
• Bargaining power of suppliers: If there are fewer product or service alternatives for consumers, suppliers like large retailers will have the power to drive down costs.  
• Threat of new entrants: What are your industry’s barriers to entry? New companies in your marketplace will increase pressure on the cost of your products and services.
• Threat of substitute products or services: Can consumers easily substitute a competitor’s product or service for yours? Your business offerings need to create value.
• Rivalry among existing competitors: How'll your competitors’ growth impact your business? The more competition in the marketplace, the harder it'll be to create value with your business offerings.

These forces determine how economic value is divided among your competitors, so using this framework will help you identify your company’s position in the industry.

The 7S model was developed by McKinsey consultants, and it emphasizes the value of strategically aligning internal departments with business processes. The key elements organizations should be looking to align include:

• Strategy: Your organization’s business plan for outperforming your competitors supported by your company’s mission and vision.
• Structure: How your internal departments and teams are organized; the chain of command.
• Systems: The procedures, daily duties, and technical infrastructure your organization uses to perform.
• Shared values: The beliefs and norms that guide your business decisions and actions; these reflect your company’s work ethic.
• Style: The way management and other stakeholders approach leadership.
• Staff: How employees are sought out and trained and what motivates them; your workers’ general capabilities.
• Skills: Your team members’ capabilities; the level of employee competence. 

The 7S model encourages leadership teams to explore the interconnectedness of these elements within the company and look for inconsistencies or areas of weakness. Once you’ve noted the areas that need to be strengthened, you can work toward realigning these elements to accomplish strategic goals in your organization.

Related: Tactical vs. strategic planning: Why you need both

Ansoff Matrix

The Ansoff Matrix framework was developed to help companies plan their growth strategies. The base for this framework is a 2x2 matrix with “products” on the x-axis and “markets” on the y-axis.

Each box within the matrix corresponds to a particular growth strategy. These are:

• Market penetration: Sell an existing product in an existing market.
• Market development: Sell an existing product in a new market.
• Product development: Sell a new product in an existing market.
• Diversification: Sell a new product in a new market.

Each business strategy is increasingly risky, with diversification being the biggest swing. The Ansoff Matrix helps organizations with financial decision-making and developing an action plan for business growth.

5 great strategic planning tools

Strategic planning tools are software programs that help teams put frameworks into action. There are many tools out there, each offering a unique specialty or perspective.

There's no one platform that's perfect for every single company. But these five are all exceptional at helping companies build their strategic plans. Find the one that best fits your company to help with planning.

Not to brag, but… Mural’s visual work platform makes strategic collaboration easier. It gives teams the tools — like custom templates and asynchronous collaboration features (like anonymous voting) — to outline business goals, identify key performance metrics, and measure results.

Mural’s templates for strategy and alignment help teams start the planning process by providing structure for frameworks like OKR or SWOT analysis . And each template features facilitation assistance to walk your team through strategic planning activities .

Cross-functional collaboration is easy in Mural — in real time or asynchronously. The anonymous voting feature, for example, lets teams come to a consensus and reach internal alignment quickly. 

ClickUp is a project management tool that helps teams prioritize tasks and organize strategic plans.

ClickUp offers templates like matrices and visual timeliness so you’re able to plug in content quickly, process this information, and start coming up with plans faster.

There’s also a feature called ClickUp Goals that helps teams break objectives down into smaller tasks using Targets or ways to measure each item. These targets include number, true/false, currency, and task.

ClickUp is comprehensive, but the pre-built automations may be limiting to some users if too many are triggered at the same time or if your organization requires more customization.

Hive marries task management with strategic planning by helping teams manage complex timelines, large-scale projects, and workflows.

Hive has goal-setting and milestone-tracking features that help teams set task dependencies, follow progress, and share reports with relevant stakeholders. Its visualization tools allow you to toggle between overarching organizational goals and individual teammate objectives. 

You can use the Hive Pages feature as a dashboard for your workspace’s hub. You can set Pages as public or private, add and customize widgets within your Pages, and even export Pages to non-Hive users.

A chat function is available within the tool, but some users have reported losing messages within the platform. So, some may find other collaboration tools more reliable for communication.

4. Airtable

Airtable is a next-generation platform that gives teams the power of relational databases in the form of user-friendly spreadsheets. It lets users organize, collaborate on, and store strategic plans within these databases.

Airtable offers an OKR tracking template that helps align teams and manage goals while maintaining accuracy. It also includes a Sync feature that updates workflows seamlessly across teams.

Airtable is a flexible tool but may have limitations, like lagging, when dealing with complex projects or datasets. Data processing functions and complicated calculations could lead to slower response times within the platform.

Trello is a Kanban-based project management tool. Its intuitive design features boards and cards, which can be used to structure strategic models and frameworks. 

Trello offers board templates for project and task management that provide organizational structures to help teams outline deliverables and assign tasks. It also features Timeline and Calendar views, so it’s easy to envision goals and schedule deadlines.

Power-Ups are Trello board features that allow you to use your favorite third-party apps directly within the platform. However, some users may find that combining Power-Ups from different vendors may cause friction in Trello’s functionality.

Bring your organization’s vision to life

There’s no one best framework or strategic planning tool — the right options for you'll depend on your organization’s vision, mission, and available resources. 

Regardless of methodology, most strategic planning begins with analyzing your current internal business environment and external factors, developing specific objectives, and creating action items to achieve these goals. 

Not sure where to start your strategic planning? Mural's template library includes preformatted, customizable frameworks (like this radar template !) to get your team on the path to success.

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

Tagged Topics

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Strategic planning templates.

Strategic planning requires coordination and organization. Browse Asana templates and discover ways to prioritize work and connect goals throughout your strategic planning process.

Strategic planning template

When you’re launching a new product, team, or even a new business, strategic planning templates keep you laser-focused and on task.

Competitive analysis template

The more you know about your competitors, the better your strategy will be. Competitive analysis templates use a data-driven approach to see exactly how your business, products, and features compare to your competition.

Nonprofit business plan template

Success doesn’t just happen—it’s planned. Stay focused on your most crucial work with a custom nonprofit business plan template.

Marketing strategy

A marketing strategy template is a useful tool that helps your marketing team achieve their goals. Learn how to create your marketing strategy with Asana.

We can all agree on company strategy in a slide, but activating that at an operational level is hard to do. Now that our plans are connected in Asana and cascade into a collective view, we can execute on a global cross-functional strategy at the scale we need to.”

Scale cross-functional collaboration

Bringing company strategy to life requires more than a fancy outline. Build your process with the Asana platform to create a connected, dynamic workflow designed to support strategy.

Integrations built for strategy

Strategic planning requires coordination and efficiency—two things that are hard to get when you’re switching between tools. With Asana’s 200+ app integrations, you can simplify how you work, plan, and communicate, all in one space.

Make meetings actionable with tasks, action items, and searchable transcripts in Asana.

Microsoft Teams

Connect your team’s conversations to actionable items in Asana.

Turn emails into trackable, actionable work with Asana for Outlook.

Your favorite work management and CRM tools, together at last. Drive seamless collaboration throughout the sales cycle to deliver amazing customer experiences.

Google Drive

Easily attach Google Drive files to tasks in Asana, and receive comment notifications to keep teams and work connected.

Turn emails into actionable, trackable tasks in Asana without leaving Gmail. Automate key actions to move work forward, all within your inbox.

Microsoft 365

Seamlessly deliver Asana notifications to your Microsoft Groups.

Give everyone access to campaign insights. Unlock your team’s work data to make smarter marketing decisions.

Explore, analyze, and share real-time business analytics, with actionable Looker dashboards in Asana.

Bring your team’s data to life with the Power BI + Asana integration.

Strategic planning, simplified

Your strategy can be complex and varied—but your planning should be simple to execute. See how you can simplify every aspect of your strategic planning, from ideation to launch.

PEST analysis

A PEST analysis template helps compile info on the external environment affecting your business. Learn how to prevent risk with a PEST analysis template.

Business plan

A business plan is the first step to start your business and secure financing. Use our business plan template so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Contingency plan

Using a contingency plan template will help you create well-developed strategies to help you protect your business from potential risk. Learn how Asana can help.

Requirements traceability matrix

A requirements traceability matrix template is a tool to help organize project requirements in a concise manner. Learn how to create one for your team.

Creating a digital punch list template can help streamline the final bits of a project for your team. Here’s how to create one.

Go-to-market strategy template

Simplify your GTM strategy with a go-to-market strategy template that aligns teams and keeps work on track. Learn how in Asana.

Project closure template

Endings are important. Create a project closure template to help your team tie up loose ends and finish their projects with confidence.

Project reporting

Stay on top of your project’s performance. Keep everyone on the same page about what’s been completed and where your project is headed.

Product roadmap

What if you could create, share, and update your product roadmap in one place? Everyone could see you’re tackling the right priorities. Start planning your product roadmap with this template.

Program roadmap

Create a program roadmap template and know the exact structure of each program, how they operate, and their future plans—company-wide.