Strategy

Strategic management is the conduct of drafting, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives. It is the process of specifying the organization's mission, vision and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which are designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the policies and plans, projects and programs. A balanced scorecard is often used to evaluate the overall performance of the business and its progress towards objectives.
Strategic management is a level of managerial activity under setting goals and over Tactics. Strategic management provides overall direction to the enterprise and is closely related to the field of Organization Studies. In the field of business administration it is useful to talk about "strategic alignment" between the organization and its environment or "strategic consistency". According to Arieu (2007), "there is strategic consistency when the actions of an organization are consistent with the expectations of management, and these in turn are with the market and the context."
“Strategic management is an ongoing process that evaluates and controls the business and the industries in which the company is involved; assesses its competitors and sets goals and strategies to meet all existing and potential competitors; and then reassesses each strategy annually or quarterly [i.e. regularly] to determine how it has been implemented and whether it has succeeded or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology, new competitors, a new economic environment., or a new social, financial, or political environment.”

Strategy formulation
Strategic formulation is a combination of three main processes which are as follows:
Performing a situation analysis, self-evaluation and competitor analysis: both internal and external; both micro-environmental and macro-environmental.
Concurrent with this assessment, objectives are set. These objectives should be parallel to a time-line; some are in the short-term and others on the long-term. This involves crafting vision statements (long term view of a possible future), mission statements (the role that the organization gives itself in society), overall corporate objectives (both financial and strategic), strategic business unit objectives (both financial and strategic), and tactical objectives.
These objectives should, in the light of the situation analysis, suggest a strategic plan. The plan provides the details of how to achieve these objectives.
Marketing action plan
Placement and execution of required resources are financial, manpower, operational support, time, technology support
Operating with a change in methods or with alteration in structure
Distributing the specific tasks with responsibility or moulding specific jobs to individuals or teams.
The process should be managed by a responsible team. This is to keep direct watch on result,comparison for betterment and best practices, cultivating the effectiveness of processes, calibrating and reducing the variations and setting the process as required.
Introducing certain programs involves acquiring the requisition of resources: a necessity for developing the process, training documentation,process testing, and imalgation with (and/or conversion from) difficult processes.
 
As and when the strategy implementation processes, there have been so many problems arising such as human relations, the employee-communication. Such a time, marketing strategy is the biggest implementation problem usually involves , with emphasis on the appropriate timing of new products. An organization, with an effective management, should try to implement its plans without signaling this fact to its competitors.[3]
In order for a policy to work, there must be a level of consistency from every person in an organization, specially management. This is what needs to occur on both the tactical and strategic levels of management.

Strategy evaluation
Measuring the effectiveness of the organizational strategy, it's extremely important to conduct a SWOT analysis to figure out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (both internal and external) of the entity in question. This may require to take certain precautionary measures or even to change the entire strategy.
In corporate strategy, Johnson and Scholes present a model in which strategic options are evaluated against three key success criteria:

• Suitability (would it work?)
• Feasibility (can it be made to work?)
• Acceptability (will they work it?)

Suitability
Suitability deals with the overall rationale of the strategy. The key point to consider is whether the strategy would address the key strategic issues underlined by the organisation's strategic position.

• Does it make economic sense?
• Would the organization obtain economies of scale, economies of scope or experience economy?
• Would it be suitable in terms of environment and capabilities?

Tools that can be used to evaluate suitability include:

• Ranking strategic options
• Decision trees
  What-if analysis
• Feasibility
• Feasibility is concerned with whether the resources required to implement the strategy are available, can be developed or obtained. Resources include funding, people, time and information.

Tools that can be used to evaluate feasibility include:

• Cash flow analysis and forecasting
• Break-even analysis
• Resource deployment analysis

Acceptability
Acceptability is concerned with the expectations of the identified stakeholders (mainly shareholders, employees and customers) with the expected performance outcomes, which can be return, risk and stakeholder reactions.
Return deals with the benefits expected by the stakeholders (financial and non-financial). For example, shareholders would expect the increase of their wealth, employees would expect improvement in their careers and customers would expect better value for money.