Strategic, Tactical, and Operational Plans: Navigating the Levels of Organizational Management

Different management approaches are used by an organization to ensure efficient coordination and performance management. Planning is the duty of the administration that is concerned with creating procedures, guidelines, and rules that will promote the company to achieve its purpose or a specific objective. It is usually carried out at both macro and micro level of management. Three plans are used within an organizational framework. They include strategic, tactical and operational planning. They all work together as a means to an end.

A strategic plan is a broad outline made by an organization’s top management that includes its primary objectives, decision making, policies and goals that help it achieve the mission of the company. This is a plan for a company when it is planning on its future pathway in a particular direction. It depicts the market aspires to enter, reformation of the executive and possible transformation of the company. It focuses on the entire organization. It may establish a target number for improving a business process. It usually looks at three to five years, but they might extend up to twenty years.

A tactical plan is much smaller but more specific than a strategic plan and plans for one to three years (Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor, 2009). It is reinforcement to the strategic plan and describes tactics that will be employed by specific division or departments to ensure the goals set in the strategic plans are achieved. It includes action points and deadlines and might establish target numbers for each section to meet the target of the strategic plan. It is usually developed in areas of production, personnel, marketing and finance (Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor, 2010).

An operational plan is designed to ensure the success of the tactical plan and is usually shorter. Each operational plan is built under specific objective. It states how the tactical plan will be carried out. It includes timelines, particular numbers, decisions of staffing and decisions of who, when, what and how different departments will work to achieve the missions in line with the tactical and strategic plans. It addresses where the company is, where they want to be, how they get there and how to measure the progress (Mikoluk, 2013).

The main difference between these plans is regarding the plan’s scope. The strategic plan is for large-scale company’s decisions to determine which directions the company is moving to; tactical plan helps through building smaller goals and objectives that ensure the success of the strategic plan. The operational plan takes the tactical plan through smaller objectives (Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor, 2009). All these plans are carried out by different level of management. A strategic plan concentrates on the whole company; the tactical plan describes the actions of various departments and divisions while operational goals details on who, what, when and how the objectives stipulated in the other two will be achieved (Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor, 2010).

Despite their difference, the plans are integrally related, all these plans work together to ensure the company moves towards the direction it aspires to. The plans must be closely related to ensuring the achievement of the mission of the organization (Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor, 2009).

For a company whose mission is to eliminate the conditions that cause poverty, one of their strategic goals can be getting legislative and public support for a change in policy. A tactical goal would be educating legislator and the public on the current policies that are roadblocks to poverty prevention, identify such policies and come up with potter policies that will replace them. The operation plan might include a series of meetings with legislators; it should determine who will participate, the number of conferences and which legislation will be changed.