Strategic Planning Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

What Is The Difference Between Strategic Planning and Business Planning?

While there is a lot of overlap between strategic planning and business planning, they are not usually the same thing. The outputs are different, because the use of the work products (i.e., the plans) are different.

A strategic plan is a document that is primarily intended to be used internally by the organization, to guide itself. In some cases, in fact, in many cases the strategic plan is never seen by anyone outside the organization. It often contains information about organizational strategy that a company might not want in the hands of its competitors.

A business plan, on the other hand, is usually meant to be used to show others. For example, if a company wishes to attract investors, the investors will want to have certain information about the company before they commit to investing. They certainly will want present financial information, and they will want to know where the company expects to get revenues in the future, its market, and so on. A bank looking at giving a loan to an organization will want similar information.

So, since the products of strategic planning and business planning are used differently, the contents are different, and the processes used to generate these plans needs to be different.

On the other hand, much of the data and information used to create one kind of plan can be re-used to create another.