Strategic Planning and the Annual Report

Short-term planning is essential to all organizations and businesses as it gives practical direction to the organization for its most important time – the present. If long range planning is the scaffolding that outlines future projects, short range planning is the brick and mortar that holds together the current ones.

Your organization should already have a long range plan. Every 3 to 5 years a long look down the road should be put on paper. But those goals are often too broad and general to use when creating your daily to-do list. Therefore short-term planning takes the extensive strategic plan and breaks it into more specific goals and sets mile-markers for the coming year. Within the framework of your 3-5 year strategy, there should be a fresh twelve month strategic plan created at the beginning of every year to guide your short term efforts.

Click here to read and print the entire article in PDF.