by Lisa Dive, Senior Client Manager, Management Support services, at Matrix on Board in Sydney
No no, not stuffing a plan to hang it over the mantelpiece. I’ve been pondering lately how we define and categorise the different types of planning jobs we do with clients.
Matrix on Board has a long history of doing both business and strategic planning with our non-profit clients. A couple of years ago Matrix decided to invest in developing a toolkit for our organisation development work (now management support services). As part of this, I was working on some tools and guidelines to capture our planning process.
A question that came up was the distinction between business planning and strategic planning. Each term had various definitions depending on which management guru you quoted, and it seemed that at Matrix we had often used them interchangeably. The best explanation was that we used whichever term the client preferred – if they (or their funder) wanted a strategic plan, that’s what we’d do, but if it was a business plan they were after we could do that too. Many of our clients were small community organisations, and strategic or business plans looked much the same no matter what we called them.
A couple of years down the road and in the context of working on a strategic plan for a strong, highly functional organisation with national reach – among other clients – the difference between the two types of plans is crystallising somewhat for me.
A larger, more complex organisation really needs more than one plan. The Board needs to develop the Strategic Plan: a high-level strategy document that sets out the vision, mission, values and top-tier goals that they want the organisation to achieve over the period of the plan (typically 3-5 years). The purpose of the Strategic Plan is to define the organisation’s identity, to provide overall direction and to guide management in their work. Managers and staff will then need to develop a Business Plan (or perhaps several, one for each business unit) – informed by the direction set in the Strategic Plan – to guide their operations.
Although both kinds of plan contain goals and strategies that should be measureable, they are informing different levels of the organisation’s activities: the Strategic Plan sets the overall direction and focus, while the Business Plan(s) guides the day-to-day operations.
In my opinion there can be different reasons for the lack of a clear distinction between business and strategic planning. It has sometimes stemmed from the small size of many of our planning clients. For a small community organisation, their high-level strategy and their operations may not be very disparate. Management committees are often fairly involved with operational issues and it doesn’t make sense to separate out two distinct plans.
Sometimes the blurry line between strategic and business plan arises from where the organisation is at: if they have a clear sense of their identity and purpose, then the Board may want to set more operational goals and strategies for management to pursue. However if the organisation’s aspirations and overall direction are a bit fuzzy or moveable, the Board’s main planning job is to articulate clearly the mission, vision and values and the high level strategic goals.
As Matrix grows and keeps working with our many and diverse clients, we need to stay flexible in our approach so we can continue to deliver the right plan for the right client.
