what is strategic and operation planing?

Strategic Planning is a management tool that helps an organization focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future. 

The process is strategic because it involves preparing the best way to respond to the circumstances of the organization's environment, whether or not its circumstances are known in advance; nonprofits often must respond to dynamic and even hostile environments. Being strategic, then, means being clear about the organization's objectives, being aware of the organization's resources, and incorporating both into being consciously responsive to a dynamic environment. 

Operation Planning is a subset of strategic work plan. It describes short-term ways of achieving milestones and explains how, or what portion of, a strategic plan will be put into operation during a given operational period, in the case of commercial application, a fiscal year or another given budgetary term. An operational plan is the basis for, and justification of an annual operating budget request. Therefore, a five-year strategic plan would need five(5) operational plans funded by five operating budgets.

Operational plans should establish the activities and budgets for each part of the organisation for the next 1 – 3 years. They link the strategic plan with the activities the organization will deliver and the resources required to deliver them.

The Operation Planning is both the first and the last step in preparing an operating budget request. As the first step, the Operation Planning provides a plan for resource allocation; as the last step, the Operation Planning may be modified to reflect policy decisions or financial changes made during the budget development process.

Operational plans should be prepared by the people who will be involved in implementation. There is often a need for significant cross-departmental dialogue as plans created by one part of the organisation inevitably have implications for other parts.