Systematic strategic planning and management

Strategic management is the process of planning, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions and actions that will enable an enterprise to achieve its long-term objectives. Strategic management allows an enterprise to be more proactive than reactive in shaping its own future; it allows an enterprise to initiate or influence activities and thus to exert control over its own destiny.In this study, after explaining the basic concepts of strategic planning and management and discussing the common problems in this area, a new model, the Systematic Strategic Planning (SSP) model, is developed to help resolve some of the identified problems in strategic planning.In the first part of the thesis, concepts, models, processes currently being used and issues of strategic management are investigated. The Systematic System Design (SSD) model, which was developed to be used in system/product design, is investigated in the second part of the thesis since this model is used as the basis for developing the SSP model. In the third part of the thesis, the SSP model is explained in details and a sample application of the SSP model is presented in order to show how the SSP model can be used in overcoming some of the issues with current practices and models of strategic planning.The sample application showed that the SSP model brings a systematic approach to the strategic planning process and allows detailed analysis of the relations and interactions between the vision, objectives, targets, strategies and the actions; provides a tool with the independence axiom to evaluate the strategies and the actions to decide if they are acceptable; and provides a tool with strategy design matrix to easily develop the action plan. It is believed that the strategic plan, developed with the SSP model will be easier to monitor and manage and will have better effectiveness.In the conclusion section, the advantages of the SSP model are summarized and possible further research that is related to this topic is discussed.