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Strategic planning software is a category of software [1] that covers a wide range of strategic topics, methodologies, modeling and reporting.
Loosely speaking, the software can be categorized into the following types:
The initial concept behind strategic planning software was the product of two different trends.
First, in the 1980s, the increasing availability of personal computers lowered the barriers to software development and made computers increasingly available to more managers. But it's worth remembering that even in 1987, selling strategic planning software often required selling a manager a computer and training them how to use productivity software (i.e. word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, outlining, etc.) Laptops were initially nonexistent and the state of art in portability was a sewing machine sized luggable computer. Previously, report creation often required hand writing or dictation which was then typed up by a secretary or word processing pool.
Second, in the early days of strategic planning concepts were few. Concepts typically included decentralization (e.g. formation of strategic business units or SBUs), relatively simplistic portfolio analysis (e.g. BCG dogs/stars/cash cow/"?" categorization), and were frequently capital and operating budgeting oriented. As a result, strategic planning software was relatively simple to create via word processing templates, graphical outputs and budgeting models.
In this approach the vision was to create a computer application that aids in a strategic planning process. The user was to be guided through the steps of the planning process. The process of guidance existed at several potential levels: (1) the furnishing of templates with categories of information that ought to be created, which implicitly suggests analysis, (2) help systems that educate users about definitions, processes, concepts, managerial models, (3) more workflow oriented interactions where inputs are manipulated, summarized or aggregated by the software. Software of this type may use questionnaires, categorical judgments, financial or market modeling and in rare cases rule based expert systems.
As a general rule, off the shelf applications are rarely successful except for relatively unskilled entrepreneurs lacking a formal business education, which perhaps accounts for the software's lack of commercial success. The most commonly used strategic planning tools and techniques tend to be relatively simple and the models used have a high level of abstraction requiring diligent interpretation and modification by participants. Systems that promise answers, e.g. rule based systems often create more value from the questioning process than from the actual answer produced in the same way that planning as an activity educates users and this education is often more important than the actual plan itself.
SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) is a good example of a heuristic that is useful but also easy to misapply. Cascading of action plans makes intuitive sense but is frequently done in such a way as to demotivate employees. Because of the difficulty of combining strategic planning, strategic management, portfolio management, information technology strategy's congruence with business strategy, implementation monitoring, scenarios and contingency planning, risk analysis, balanced scorecard specifically and dashboards generally, the strategy process tends to be difficult to deal with comprehensively in a single software package. In large companies, the constant tends to be that the financial function ends up with significant influence over the process because of the requirement to report to the Board of Directors and manage capital and operating budgets.
One of the current[ when? ] trends in strategic planning is the adoption of agile or lean methodologies. By their very nature, agile frameworks tend to be strong on emphasizing employee accountability and less interested in documentation. [5] The emergence of agile in technology areas parallels the transformation of strategic planning to strategic management. Excessive documentation becomes an obstacle to revision as new information is gained about competitors, customers, distributors and suppliers. Agile's importance is driven by the faster rate of technology innovation, the lower cost of developing applications, the increase in the number of companies and individuals with similar capabilities, and faster learning from markets.
An excellent example of an extremely well specified agile framework is Scrum. Scrum falls into the category of a framework for autonomous work teams. Scrum approaches are now expanding outside of its initial application area in software development to other areas of business. However, Scrum tends to limit itself to prioritization rather than more traditional strategic planning processes. Unlike traditional strategic planning which was frequently tied to the annual budgeting process, Scrum is more iterative. Scrum projects have daily, iterative phase or "sprint" planning, and release planning which represents something akin to multi-generational product or strategy plan. [6]
Traditionally, strategic planning was done 3–6 months prior to the beginning of the budget year, which ensured that decision making lagged market trends. Strategic management where the strategic planning process was pushed down in the organization has tended to follow this approach, the new variable being the accountability for both plan development and execution. Agile and more project oriented approaches work well in start-ups that lack the bureaucracy of larger companies, but they too always run into the issue of updating operating and capital budgets, along with risk profiles.[ citation needed ]
A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
In software and systems engineering, the phrase use case is a polyseme with two senses:
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:
In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing software or system requirements.
In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life-cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The systems development life cycle concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.
Scenario planning, scenario thinking, scenario analysis, scenario prediction and the scenario method all describe a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence.
In software development, agile practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s), adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continual improvement, and flexible responses to changes in requirements, capacity, and understanding of the problems to be solved.
Financial modeling is the task of building an abstract representation of a real world financial situation. This is a mathematical model designed to represent the performance of a financial asset or portfolio of a business, project, or any other investment.
The demand chain is that part of the value chain which drives demand.
Within project management, scrum, sometimes written Scrum or SCRUM, is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining products in a complex environment, with an initial emphasis on software development, although it has been used in other fields including research, sales, marketing and advanced technologies. It is designed for teams of ten or fewer members, who break their work into goals that can be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints, no longer than one month and most commonly two weeks. The scrum team assess progress in time-boxed daily meetings of 15 minutes or less, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: the sprint review which demonstrates the work done to stakeholders to elicit feedback, and sprint retrospective which enables the team to reflect and improve.
Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization.
A glossary of terms relating to project management and consulting.
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software development life cycle (SDLC). The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software:
Robust decision-making (RDM) is an iterative decision analytic framework that aims to help identify potential robust strategies, characterize the vulnerabilities of such strategies, and evaluate the tradeoffs among them. RDM focuses on informing decisions under conditions of what is called "deep uncertainty", that is, conditions where the parties to a decision do not know or do not agree on the system model(s) relating actions to consequences or the prior probability distributions for the key input parameters to those model(s).
An enterprise planning system covers the methods of planning for the internal and external factors that affect an enterprise.
Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) is the software development portion of the Disciplined Agile Toolkit. DAD enables teams to make simplified process decisions around incremental and iterative solution delivery. DAD builds on the many practices espoused by advocates of agile software development, including scrum, agile modeling, lean software development, and others.
