Strategic planning is the systematic process of deciding on future organizational goals, and identifying, selecting, and implementing optimal approaches to achieving these goals, subject to constraints on time, budgets, or other factors. In addition, the selected strategies must be flexible enough to evolve as assumptions, trends, and situations change. The Intersect Insight team has supported a variety of clients in preparing strategic plans, business plans, and business cases applicable in a variety of settings. These analyses have included situation analyses (including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats – SWOT), business development and marketing strategies (viewing stakeholders, competitors, customers, the supply chain, and substitutes or possible disrupting events), needs assessments, business intelligence, and financial analysis and forecasts.
Above all, it is critical to understand the predilections and goals of decision makers and their time horizons and information needs by interviewing stakeholders. From this starting point, Intersect Insight’s analysts view information availability (or surrogate indicators when required information is unobtainable), select from possible data collection approaches, employ analytical tools to understand and store relevant information, and prepare succinct but actionable plans and subplans to guide the decision makers in allocating resources while minimizing risks or the possible harmful effects of their decisions.