Strategy planning software

Strategic planning for setting objectives and goals

Unlock collaborative strategic planning with Mural. Outline goals, identify key metrics, and track progress with a platform built for enterprises.

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Strategic planning

Strategic planning FAQs

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Why Mural for strategic planning & management

Strategic planning is the foundation of organizational success, yet many teams struggle with fragmented processes and misaligned goals.

Mural brings stakeholders together to create cohesive strategies that translate vision into actionable outcomes. Use the platform to:

Organize your ideas and give them structure with flexible frameworks, mind maps, diagrams, and more to define strategy and tactics that align with your organizational goals.
Lead more productive strategic planning meetings with facilitation tools like timer, anonymous voting, and private mode that enhance strategic co-planning sessions and keep teams focused on developing strategies effectively.
Ensure that everyone is engaged and all voices are heard, even those who aren’t naturally inclined to speak up in meetings.
Kickstart your planning process with one of our strategy or alignment templates designed to guide users through development of business strategy with best practices for setting clear objectives.
Stop losing sight of your key ideas or progress in endless email or message threads.

Mural is a powerful digital workspace that transforms collaborative strategic planning for teams developing strategies across all organizational levels.

Mural centralizes your strategy work in one, easy-to-access visual workspace — allowing team members to outline priorities and action plans and map out complex organizational blueprints in real-time, regardless of their physical location.

This unified planning environment not only accelerates the decision-making process but also fosters deeper creativity and engagement among participants, all while developing strategies that drive measurable business outcomes.

How to use Mural as a strategic planning tool

Mural makes it easy to organize, collect feedback, refine your approach, and build a strategic plan through real-time and asynchronous collaboration in a shared visual space. To use Mural as a strategy planner for effective strategies and setting objectives, you should:

Start with a blank canvas or with one of Mural's templates designed for organizational strategic planning. Our strategic planning templates for goal setting include proven planning and alignment frameworks that help define your business goals and tactics to ensure long-term success.
Each template includes facilitation features and tips to guide your team through each activity with steps for effective strategic goal setting. Learn more about Mural's Facilitation Superpowers™ features and tools.
Run an engaging, high-impact strategy planning session or invite your team to share feedback asynchronously, guided by best practices for setting clear, goal-aligned objectives.
Embed or export a visual representation of your strategic plan outline to share with anyone, inside or outside the Mural platform, ensuring your strategic planning tool outputs can be easily distributed and referenced across your organization.

Strategy blueprint template in Mural — Get started with the Mural Strategy Blueprint template.

What are the benefits of using strategic planning software? Strategic planning software helps streamline and enhance the planning process for businesses (and, most importantly, the people doing the planning). Here are some key advantages:

Better collaboration: Facilitates dynamic collaborative strategic planning among team members, allowing for instant sharing of ideas and feedback when developing strategies, regardless of geographical location. This ensures all stakeholders can contribute to defining tactics effectively, and that diverse perspectives are captured and integrated into your organizational framework.
Increased efficiency: Automates and organizes planning tasks using strategic planning templates, reducing time spent on manual data entry and analysis while accelerating decision-making processes. Teams can focus on setting objectives and developing strategies rather than administrative overhead.‍
Improved visibility: Provides a clear overview of strategic goals, progress, and outcomes through visual strategic plan outlines, making it easier for managers to track advancements and align organizational strategic planning efforts across departments and teams. ‍
Scalability: Adapts to the needs of any organization implementing cross-functional collaboration, regardless of size or sector, and scales as businesses grow or as strategic planning requirements change over time. This supports everything from small team goal setting to enterprise-wide strategy building.

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Strategic planning FAQs

What is meant by strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the systematic process of defining an organization's direction and making decisions on allocating resources to pursue it. It involves defining the organization’s direction, developing a business strategy definition that outlines their long-term goals, identifying key priorities, and establishing a roadmap for achieving organizational objectives. This includes making decisions on allocating resources to pursue this direction.

This process helps organizations assess their current situation, define their vision for the future, and establish measurable goals and objectives to guide them. Strategic planning is a disciplined effort that produces fundamental decisions and actions shaping and guiding what an organization is, who it serves, what it does, and why it does it, all with a focus on the future.

What activities are involved in strategic planning?

Strategic planning encompasses several key activities including environmental analysis, goal setting, resource allocation, and performance measurement.

Teams typically begin by setting the vision and mission of the organization, which clarifies the long-term desired position and the fundamental purpose of the organization, respectively.

Following this, environmental scanning is conducted to gather information about the organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. This involves conducting SWOT analyses, defining strategic objectives, and developing strategies that support organizational growth.

The next step is to establish long-term goals and objectives that align with the vision and mission. These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Strategy formulation then follows, where the organization decides on the best courses of action to achieve these objectives. This includes planning for different scenarios and deciding on the necessary resource allocation. Once strategies are developed, they're implemented through detailed action plans that specify what is to be done, by whom, and when. This phase often requires effective communication and change management strategies to ensure buy-in from all stakeholders.

Finally, the strategic planning process includes ongoing monitoring and evaluation to assess progress towards the objectives, allowing for adjustments and refinements to strategies as necessary. This guarantees that the strategic plan remains relevant and effective in guiding the organization’s actions.

Using strategic planning templates for goal setting helps ensure comprehensive coverage of all essential planning components.

What are strategic planning tools?

Strategic planning tools are digital platforms, frameworks, and resources that facilitate the strategy development process.

These tools for strategic planning can be used for brainstorming and ideation, organization and feedback, and diagramming and mapping to create a visual representation of a planning framework.

Effective strategy planner software should include a comprehensive set of features that facilitate thorough and efficient strategic planning. Key features should encompass goal-setting tools that help define clear, measurable objectives (like Mural’s strategic planning templates that provide structured approaches and guides that help teams get aligned faster); collaboration capabilities that allow team members to work together in real-time, regardless of location; and tracking tools that provide insights into performance metrics and progress.

Visual mapping tools, such as charts and graphs, are also essential for illustrating relationships and timelines, making complex data easier to understand and act upon. Lastly, a user-friendly interface and robust security measures are crucial to ensure ease of use and data protection.

Can Mural be used to visualize a strategic plan?

Glad you asked! Mural is an excellent strategic planning tool to help you visualize complex or extensive strategies. Our strategic planning templates and facilitation features make it easy for organizations to transform abstract strategic concepts into clear, actionable visual representations that stakeholders can easily understand and reference.

Our versatile platform supports a wide array of visual elements such as mind maps, flowcharts, and diagrams, which can be used to outline and connect various components of an execution plan. Users can easily drag and drop these elements to represent different priorities, processes, and relationships, making complex plans more understandable and actionable.

Also, Mural's interactive features and co-creation tools enable collective strategic planning by allowing team members to contribute simultaneously from anywhere in the world. This helps to make sure that all perspectives are integrated into the strategic plan in real-time — enhancing team alignment and encouraging continuous refinement and improvement of your execution roadmap, making Mural a dynamic tool for effective strategic planning.