Strategic planning Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Strategic planning - Research Paper Example Why Do Strategic Planning? Failing to make plans means making plans for failure – as the old saying goes. Having a strategic plan means an improvement in performance in whichever undertaking a person involves himself or herself into; you cannot fail if you have a clearly defined roadmap to your desired destination. Another reason to make strategic plans is for the sake of avoiding short-term as well as inward thinking. It also enables a person, an organization or a company to be able to come up with solutions to various major issues at macro levels. Finally, having a strategic plan means the ability to have the ability to communicate to everyone concerned about an issue, the most important or vital elements or aspects about an issue. When planning strategically, there are questions a person needs to ask himself, or herself. Some of these questions include: Where is locus at this point in time? – assessment Which point do we desire to be? This is the future state or the state we will be at the end of it all How do we hope to close the gap between our present state and our end state? This is where the strategic plan comes into place How do we plan to monitor our progress? This involves the balanced scorecard While choosing or coming up with a strategic plan for the endeavors we engage in, it is prudent to keep in mind the fact that for a strategic plan to be considered good, it should†¦ Be able to address issues of critical performance Be able to create the right and desired balance in between the abilities of the organization, and the desires of the organization Be able to span a considerable period in time in order to close down the performance gap Be a visionary strategic plan. This means it should be able to convey an and state the way it is desired form the beginning Be flexible. This means that the strategic plan should accommodate and allow for change Guide the decision making in the operational, individual, and tactical lower levels of the organization or institution There are quite a number of strategic planning model. The model I choose for the purposes of this paper and assignment is the ABCDE strategic planning model. ABCDE is an acronym that stands for Assessment, baseline, Components, Down to specifics, Evaluate. Before getting started on the strategic planning tasks and activities, there are pre-requisites to the planning steps. These include: Find out if or whether the senior leadership is committed enough to go through with the strategic process. Find out who will be tasked to do what? Find out the activities and the responsibilities each group will be tasked to do Figure out which methods will be used to handle tasks Find out the best time to do tasks Features of the ABCDE Strategic Planning Model ASSESSMENT This involves engaging in a SWOT analysis to find out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, as well as the threats to the task you would like to engage in. The SWOT analysis best handles assessm ent because of the ease in understanding associated with it. Additionally, SWOT can be applied at any level of the organization in charge of the strategic planning. When saying strengths, I mean the things that you, as an organization or as an individual can be able to perform well in; points of strength. On the other hand, weaknesses are the obstacles to the path that leads to the destination. These may be such things as bad leadership or lack of it at

Essentials of Evidence-Based Practice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Essentials of Evidence-Based Practice - Essay Example e status of vasectomy via interviews; most of the interviews involved telephoning, administration of questionnaires, the use of the healthcare centres registries, as well as the physical interview by nurses. Among the participants of the research included patients that had experienced the vas deferens’ surgical operation. In order to control the cases study various controls were taken into account; these included individuals that were diagnosed with skin and lung cancer. Other conditions such as digestive disorders and rehabilitation problems, as well as the neighbours of the patients were also treated as the controls of the case study (Bernal, Latour and Gomez, 2012). However, as regards they made decisions regarding the relevance of the primary studies, Bernal, Latour and Gomez (2012) do not point out the modality of selecting the papers for a review. The quality of the methodology was evaluated by taking into consideration a number of threats that are likely to be absent or present with respect to the validity. Among the threats included misclassifying of a disease and inadequacy of selecting the controls. Bernal, Latour and Gomez (2012) carried out an observation on a population of 221,238. Out of this population, 14,334 were categorized under case-control studies, while 206,904 fell under the cohort studies; there were nine case-control studies, and five cohort studies. Following the research, Bernal, Latour and Gomez (2012) claimed that the experimental evidence that was attained regarding the relationship between prostate cancer and vasectomy was characterized by a low level of quality. It was identified that there are several biases with respect to the sources; the sources attempted to overestimate the effect of vasectomy. In this respect, the evidence that was experienced does not advocate for a change in the family planning; this is due to lack of justified evidence. Similarly, the evidence does not indicate whether individuals who have experienced