A strategic plan is a management tool that assists the purpose of helping a company do a better job. The main reason is that strategic plan enables a company to achieve long-term success by enhancing teamwork and sharing mission (Peterson, Jaret & Schenck 2011, ch. 15., p 287). The strategic plan of the University of Edinburgh 2012-2016 has both strengths and weaknesses. One of the main strengths of the plan is that it identifies a clear vision to communicate to stakeholders. As it identified that organization is committed to excellence in education, research and innovation. In addition, the strategic plan provides a notion about the strategic goals of the organization, including excellence in education, research and innovation. Each strategic goal is explained by identifying main aim, objectives to meet aim and strategies to achieve those objectives. For instance, one of the aims of the organization is to foster vibrant and interactive research community. To meet this aim, the objectives include new and emerging research areas, provision of leadership, realization of full potential of breath and volume of research base, and generation of group of future research leaders. Moreover, to achieve the objectives strategies include fostering of new tools to cross-disciplinary research, securing strategic partnerships, and maximization of competitive research funding success. Furthermore, enablers to achieve goals are identified like people, infrastructure, and finance. In addition, strategic plan includes six strategic themes (strategic actions) such as outstanding students experience, global impact, lifelong community, social responsibility, partnerships, and equality and widening participation along with key performance indicators and targets for each strategic action.
Apart from strengths, the strategic plan of the university also has limitations. One of the weaknesses of the strategic plan is that it does not include executive summary to provide a brief overview to the readers/stakeholders. In addition, environmental scanning identifies the need of new strategies by scanning internal and external environment (Haines 2000, ch.5, p.79). However, it has not been included in the strategic plan of university. Moreover, there are no implementation action plans i.e. initial dates and target completion dates. In addition, budgets are not included by the strategists along with monitoring/evaluation methods. The earlier described factors are important for a comprehensive strategic plan, but the strategic plan of the university is not an effective plan due to absence of key areas need to be included.
References
Haines, S. (2000). The systems thinking approach to strategic planning and management. USA: CRC Press.
Peterson, S. D., Jaret, P. E., & Schenck, B. F. (2011). Business plans kit for dummies. USA: John Wiley & Sons.
