TABLE OF CONTENTS Category 2 addresses the area of strategic business planning. The criteria in Category 2 focus on how the organization develops short- and longer-term business plans. Although it is only worth 85 points, your responses to this section can help or hurt your scores in other sections. Not having a good plan will probably dramatically impact your business results in section 7, which are worth 45% of the points.
The 2003 Award Criteria Booklet defines this category as follows:
The Strategic Planning Category examines HOW your organization develops STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES and ACTION PLANS. Also examined are HOW chosen STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES and ACTION PLANS are deployed and HOW progress is measured. (p. 15)
This category is purposely vague about how a company needs to do strategic planning, because approaches may differ widely between a big corporation and a very small business. The small business is unlikely to have a formal strategic planning process and document, whereas the big corporation probably has many plan documents for its different businesses and has a much more structured approach to planning. As with any item that asks about your approach in Baldrige, what's important is that you tailor your approach to what's appropriate for your company or organization. A company with 25 employees that has a long and structured approach to planning with many levels of goals, objectives, and strategies may end up with a low score because their approach is overkill for a business their size.
This Category...
