Strategic vs. Tactical Planning: Understanding the Differences

Strategy and tactics apply to a range of topics, from sports to business. 

You often see the terms thrown around in business articles. Sometimes, they’re even interchanged. However, they are distinctly different. 

In this article, we aim to dispel any misinterpretations about strategy vs tactics. We’ll explain how both are relevant to your business before showing you how to create your very own strategic and tactical plans.

Key takeaways:

• Strategy vs. Tactics: Strategy involves long-term planning to achieve broad goals, while tactics focus on short-term, detailed actions that execute the strategy.
• Timeline Differences: Strategy covers medium to long-term goals, often spanning years. Tactics are focused on day-to-day operations and short-term objectives.
• Examples of Strategy and Tactics: A medical company may strategically focus on gaining credibility through accreditations, while the tactical side might involve product demonstrations and staff training.
• Importance of Alignment: Both plans must align so that employees know their roles and responsibilities, ensuring clarity and cohesion throughout the organization.
• Monitoring and Adjustment: Tactical plans are fluid and require regular monitoring and adaptation to ensure progress and alignment with the overarching strategy.

Quick Summary

Strategic and tactical planning are like two sides of the same coin. Strategic plans look through a broad lens and include the key aspects of a campaign. Tactical plans delve deeper into the shorter-term operations needed to make the strategy a success. 

Strategic plans can include 10-year goals. They come from the top of the organization and typically involve stakeholder input. A solid strategy also considers important external factors, like the economy or shifting dynamics in the market.

Tactical plans are born from strategy. In a nutshell, they cover the day-to-day operations that drive the overall strategy. Tactics have a shorter-term focus. They are often delegated to managers or departments who are given the responsibility of delivering in their areas.

What’s the Difference Between Strategy and Tactics?

There are several key differences between strategy vs tactics but the main distinction is the timeline. 

In summary, a strategic plan is a long-term path toward your goals. A tactical plan includes the details and specific actions needed to succeed in your strategy. Both are necessary for business success. 

Definition of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning refers to the medium to long-term goals of an organization. The plan defines the goals and gives a road map for how to reach them. A strategic plan loosely connects the dots between the starting point and the finish line without going into the intricacies. 

As the driving force behind achieving your organization’s goals, a strategy takes time to construct. It should not only be aspirational, but it should also be realistic. 

Coming up with a strategic plan is a lengthy process. You must not only consider your organizational growth. You should also think about potential external factors that could impact your plan.

A quality strategic plan combines input from multiple sectors within the business. Furthermore, it typically involves stakeholder opinion. Since strategic planning involves laying the foundations, it comes before tactics.

Strategic Planning Example 

Let’s consider the medical technology industry. 

One of the main challenges for medical equipment manufacturers is clinical adoption. Convincing healthcare providers, clients, or hospitals to use their technology requires strategy, which inevitably leads to increased workflow, training, preparing product demonstrations, and more (tactics).

Main Clinic Supply, a leading supplier of medical oxygen equipment, overcame this obstacle by focusing on credibility. The company is an authorized dealer of medical equipment and has multiple accreditations.

With credentials to deliver equipment to Mayo Clinic hospitals, Main Clinic Supply can gain trust with clients and medical vendors quickly. Furthermore, becoming an authorized dealer gives them access to a bigger network that may include other Mayo Clinic hospitals or notable medical centers. 

Benefits of Strategic Planning

A strategic plan aligns team members from various departments, as well as the stakeholders. Since it involves everyone, the plan gives key employees clarity over what’s expected from them and why. To boot, everyone is singing off the same hymn sheet. 

Good strategic planning involves forecasting and projections, that are calculated by diving into data. With access to data points from your strategic plan, decision-makers within the business can proceed confidently and in line with the overall objectives.

Kanban Zone’s Portfolio Kanban Strategy template is an ideal tool for teams to easily visualize their strategies and track the progress of implementation.

Finally, your strategic plan gives you a reference point. It allows you to monitor and gauge progress at a glance. Inevitably, this may lead to changes and adjustments. Adaptation is part of the process and helps ensure your company can adjust to the environment and economy. 

Strategic planning helps you hone in on what you can achieve within a certain amount of time. It lays the foundations for deploying your tactical plan.

Definition of Tactical Planning

Tactical planning involves far more detail than strategy, focusing on the smaller steps that get your organization to the end goal. 

Think of strategic planning like creating the blueprints or architectural drawings for a building. Tactical planning outlines precisely how many bricks you’ll need, the quantity of required cement, and other specific needs to construct a building. 

When it comes to business, it’s the day-to-day activities that fill the gaps between steps on your strategic plan. It involves the operational side of business as well as who is responsible for each component of the plan.

With tactical planning, it’s important to set clear, specific short-term goals. This also involves identifying KPIs to measure progress. Most importantly, you must make sure your tactical plan underlays the overall strategy.

Tactical planning example 

For this example, let’s take a look at Eden Emerald Mortgages (EEM), a mortgage broker that provides value to clients in various ways, like mortgage calculators, assistance with grants, existing relationships with lenders, etc.

If EEM worked on a strategic plan to increase mortgage applications by 20% by the end of the year, the tactical plan would contain the shorter-term details on how it’s going to get there. 

For example, the first quarter tactical plan could involve demographic research to determine where high-demand areas are. This could be followed up with social media and Google ad campaigns that display customized messaging for viewers. Retargeting ads could then be used for certain customers. 

Benefits of Tactical Planning

Tactical planning helps bring your strategic plan to life. What’s more, breaking down the roadmap makes large, intimidating goals more achievable and easy to understand. This allows various departments to prioritize actions, initiate campaigns, and make the right decisions. 

Furthermore, tactical planning is relevant now. It focuses on short-term targets that are relevant to the current business environment. This keeps employees aligned with the mission without overwhelming them with bigger-picture objectives.

Lastly, since tactical plans focus on the short-term, it’s easier to assign metrics for measuring progress. You can easily identify if your strategy is on track or needs tweaking. 

How to Create a Strategic Plan

There are several key steps to creating a strategic plan. Depending on the nature of your business, you may have to adjust or skip one. However, to help you with yours, we’ve outlined the most important aspects of creating a strategic plan. 

Go Through the Organization’s Existing Objectives

Reflect on the general objectives of the company. These should be the overarching goals of what the organization is trying to be. Consult all departments to make sure each one is aligned.

Research the Market

Analyze the existing marketplace and identify the top players in your industry. Take note of what your competitors are doing, what customers want and need, and where consumers are being underserved.

Be aware of any external factors that could impact your strategy, such as supply-chain issues or regulation changes.

The extent of market research needed will depend on your industry. In the world of dropshipping, for example, you must constantly monitor the market. The market can shift dramatically due to a range of reasons, from port congestion to increasing fuel prices.

On the other hand, digital dropshipping is often less volatile. Since it involves digital products, like online courses, socio-economic shifts have less of an impact. While you’ll still need to survey the market, it’s not as much of a continuous process.

Define the Organization’s Mission and Vision

This is an upper-management task and should occur alongside key stakeholders. The prior steps should help with this point, making it a much more linear and straightforward process.

Long-Term Goal Setting

At this point, you establish what the big goals are. As always, you should work backward from the goal, outlining a broad road map. 

What might this look like?

Let’s say you provide an online service, such as music lessons, like Classical Guitar Shed. 

A straightforward strategy might be to create a backlog of high-quality educational guitar content. The long-term goal here would be to make the website one of the go-to reliable resources for guitar players of all levels.

In creating the strategic plan for this goal, you could consider key actions to make the goal a reality. This might include creating video tutorials, developing guitar tablatures for students, or designing an entire syllabus. Tactical planning dives deeper into what this strategy would entail.

Provisioning

The final step is resourcing. With core team members, determine what capital is needed, whether the goals are financially viable, what staff you need, and any other resource requirements (e.g. new technology or software).

How Kanban Zone Can Help You Create a Strategic Plan

At Kanban Zone, we know that all industries have unique challenges and requirements, especially when it comes to strategic planning. We provide a fully customizable process management platform that can be tailored to your specific needs.

Efficient workflows are essential for a cohesive strategy. Our platform promotes visual collaboration with real-time updates, comments, and file sharing. It also facilitates capacity planning so you can allocate workloads and resources across key departments involved in strategic decision-making. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to strategic planning. Therefore, we allow multiple integrations with market-leading tools, like Clio, Google Drive, Jira, and more, to ensure you have everything you need to nail this step.

You can read more about our strategic solutions here.

How to Create a Tactical Plan

Tactical planning is more precise than strategic planning, given the operational element. Based on a shorter timeframe, you can monitor a tactical plan as soon as it’s up and running. Below, you’ll find the key steps to creating one.

Strategy Alignment

The first step is to study the strategy and gauge all the major steps and milestones. Next, hone in on the goals that can be measured imminently (e.g. the first or second quarter).

Depending on the project and the depth of the planning, you may only be able to work on the tactics for weeks or months at a time. For longer-term projects, this could be up to a year.

Planning and Tactics Identification

With a heightened focus on short-term objectives, management must start identifying what needs to be done. The organization’s key members develop specific actions to ensure the company meets its strategic goals. This process can involve setting smaller goals, which in turn will mean creating a new, more comprehensive timeline.

Assigning Responsibility 

With the key details ironed out, you need to begin assigning responsibility. Without this step, deadlines inevitably get missed. Choose the right team or team members to lead each task or campaign.

Resource Allocation

Most strategies and campaigns require a budget, at the very least. More complex plans need other resources, like software, equipment, products, etc. If certain departments are underfunded or not supported with adequate resources, there will be significant knock-on effects.

For example, consider a law firm looking to expand its client base beyond its locality. At the very least this would require investment in social media advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). 

Companies like LawRank provide specialist digital marketing services to help law firms rank on Google’s first page, which is one of the key factors in expanding an audience. Using resources to work with a company like LawRank requires investment but it’s a tactic that should pay off long term.

Attempting to handle SEO in-house might save money in the short term but is likely to fail, which will make long-term strategic goals harder to meet.

Identifying KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are needed to measure the progress of your campaign. Take time to identify the most suitable KPIs for the main short-term objectives.

Monitor and Adjust

Tactics are fluid and ongoing. You can’t just kick off a plan and let it work its magic. You’ll need to monitor progress and make adjustments if needed. How often you assess the plan and make adjustments will depend, but weekly, monthly, or quarterly audits are most typical.

How Kanban Zone Can Help You Create a Tactical Plan

Kanban Zone will help transform how your team executes tactical plans. Our platform is purpose-built with quality features to drive success across multiple sectors within your business.

Our collaboration features keep your team connected, even if they’re remote. Multiple members can access projects and work on them together in real time, keeping everybody on the same page. Visual boards allow project leaders to check in on progress and monitor how various tactical tasks are being executed.

Certain administrative tasks can be automated, improving efficiency and minimizing time spent on repetitive work. 

One of the most important aspects of a tactical plan is analysis. Ongoing work must be carefully monitored, measured, and analyzed. Kanban Zone offers in-depth reporting on task progress, team productivity, and project timelines. All work can be approached methodically, backed by data, giving your tactical plan the best chance of success.

Kanban Zone’s advanced metrics feature allows users to analyze performance and have a clearer understanding of their team’s productivity.

These features barely scratch the surface of what’s possible with Kanban Zone. For more details on our platform, read through our product details here.

If strategic or tactical planning has been a sticking point for your business, you’re not alone. These are important processes that impact the success of your business. Kanban Zone is the ultimate process efficiency solution for businesses of all sizes. It might just be exactly what you need. 

The best part? You can try it for free.