Abstract

This qualitative research study explored the impact of strategic planning in small businesses within the service industry, specifically in East Tennessee. The focus was to gauge the level of importance small businesses placed on strategic planning, if any. The general problem to be addressed was the level of importance small businesses place on strategic planning that could affect organizational problems such as high turnover, low job satisfaction, poor engagement and performance, financial uncertainty, customer dissatisfaction, tarnished company reputation, and company closure. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to enhance the body of knowledge through magnifying the explanations behind organizational and operational issues in the service industry and the impact strategic planning could offer. Three research questions were designed to investigate further. The study consisted of one ten question interview that was strategically designed and given to 23 small businesses to provide their own unique experiences. Six themes emerged after organizing and analyzing the data. Themes included participants asking for more information or examples of specific interview questions, participants having a sudden realization of the use of strategic planning within their business or changing their perspective on the use of strategic planning terminology, placing a high importance on strategic planning, and referencing covid as a challenging in planning. In completing the final analysis, it was noted that the strategic planning and strategic management body of knowledge is evolving and mutating rapidly, especially after the pandemic in 2020 affected small businesses. The findings pointed to a need for more research involving the innovations and adaptations small businesses used to navigate organizational problems post pandemic, and ways small business owners could use strategy in planning for events that are uncertain or unexpected.

1- Introduction

2- The Strategic Planning Method for the Sustainability Integration in the Product Development Process (PEPDIPS)

3- Application of the PEPDIPS method

4- Discussion

5- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Sustainability issues have been force companies to change how they think about their business models if they want to keep a competitive advantage. However, despite the diversity of tools for sustainable production, the integration of its concept has not yet reached a significant number of companies around the world. The reason for this is the need of more knowledge about sustainability integration’ importance to the company in the long term, the difficulty to identify the initial point to changes or the difficulty to structure this advance in the improvement process. Based on this scenario, this paper presents the Strategic Planning method for the Sustainability Integration in the Product Development Process which aims to guide, facilitate and accelerate the sustainability integration into the product development process by make changes in the business management with the support of the strategic planning and the continuous improvement process. It is a maturity method that can be applied by any type of company because of their use of a common set of evaluation parameters. The benefits from this research are the improvement, deepening, and systematization of the sustainability issues in the product development process through a maturity view of the strategic planning concept, and, the development of a new guide to assessing the companies’ strengths and weakness to drive the implementation of a shared vision between multiples teams. Also, the application of the conceptual method is presented.

Introduction

Sustainability issues have been causing direct interference in the business’s characteristics of the 21st century since it strengthens the companies’ competitive advantage (Nidumolu et al., 2009). And more, sustainability can drivers innovation strategies (Klewitz and Hansen, 2014) and it will ongoing be common because reducing pollution is often coincident with improvements in the productivity (Porter and Van der Linde, 1995). On this point, Shrivastava (1995) describes that in order to achieve sustainable development companies need to have the organizational capacity to create inimitable green production systems, through the development of new structured strategies for environmental improvements, whose costs must be efficient to ensure the long-term profit. Based on this, Bocken et al. (2014) argue that sustainable business models are innovations that change the way the organization creates, deliver and capture value. Even so, sustainable production remains a challenge for professionals and academics because many companies still need systematic orientations on how to manage sustainability integration into business processes (Karlsson and Luttropp, 2006). And, also on how sustainable strategies are formed (Behnam and Rasche, 2009). In addition, the literature of sustainable business model little discusses how to link sustainability practices and overall organizational performances (Maletic et al., 2014). So, there is a common sense about the necessity to have more general framework with the possibilities of being applied in most organizations to help it make sustainability integration (Baumgartner and Ebner, 2010). Also, these new general frameworks should assess the current state and the longer-term of sustainability integration in company decision systems (Hallstedt et al., 2010). Thus, strategies approaches need to be used to support sustainable new product development (Gmelin and Seuring, 2014).

مقاله سال 2017

The use of projects in organizations has increased steadily over the last several decades. Although there has been some indication that projects are becoming more successful, there is still evidence that a substantial number of projects do not meet goals or expectations (Allen et al., 2014). McKinsey and Company (2012) found that, on average, large information technology (IT) projects “run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted.” The Standish Group’s CHAOS Project, which tracks IT projects over time, shows limited progress in successful project completion over the last two decades. (http://www.standishgroup.com).

With this increasing use of projects yet limited project success, examination of PM success and failure continues to be an area of considerable interest (Allen et al., 2014). Leybourne (2007) reviewed the changing emphasis of PM research, recognizing a number of areas that have been examined in the past: identification of critical success factors, evaluation of specific PM methods, and assessment of PM tools/techniques. Although findings from such studies have certainly contributed to the PM field, the research has been limited to a narrow set of constructs. As Leybourne (2007) discusses, it may be time to move beyond them.

Several authors have pointed out the lack of theoretical underpinnings in PM research (e.g., Drouin and Jugdev, 2014; Killien et al., 2012; Parker et al., 2015; Patanakul and Shenhar, 2012) recommending application of theory from related disciplines to advance PM as a field. Drouin and Jugdev (2014, p. 64) state that use of existing theory and constructs will “foster credibility of the findings” but the “current state of theoretical evolution in PM hampers researchers in using well-developed concepts to investigate by operationalizing constructs with existing valid and reliable instruments or items from instruments.” Examples of such research are studies by Drouin and Jugdev (2014), Killien et al. (2012), and Parker et al. (2015), which adapted the resource-based view from the strategic management field within a PM context.

Purpose – Today knowledge extraction and sharing in the organizations have been positioned as one of the most significant managers’ priorities. However, despite huge investments in KM (Knowledge Management) area, the failure rates of these projects are high. One of the main reasons for this failures is the lack of a roadmap and a methodology for KM strategic planning which assist organizations to develop an integrated and aligned plan with business strategies which eventually reduces project’s failure rate. Yet, despite the extension of KM domain, little studies were conducted on strategic topics and especially KM strategic planning. Therefore, the aim of this study is to offer an integrated methodology for KM strategic planning. Design/methodology/approach – This paper introduces a methodology for KM strategic planning by using the mixed methods. At the first stage, along with a comprehensive literature review, some semi-structured interviews with KM experts were conducted and the obtained data have been analyzed using the thematic analysis. After that, a survey is conducted to validate the extracted dimensions and activities of the proposed methodology via expert s’ viewpoints. Findings – The results indicate that the main phases of the KM strategic planning methodology are as follows: Strategic review, strategic orientation, implementation, and evaluation. In the proposed methodology, main phases along with their related activities and their implementation order are presented as a roadmap for applying KM initiatives strategically. Research implications (if applicable) – In KM planning strategically, all phases of strategic management along with their related activities must be considered simultaneously. The proposed methodology can assist KM policymakers to identify and guide KM initiatives as well as to perform appropriate actions for progress. This paper tries to develop a coherent roadmap for knowledge initiatives by a strategic approach. Originality/value – One of the major reasons for the failure of many KM projects is the absence of a strategic planning methodology. A review of the KM literature shows that there are few studies, which adequately integrate strategic KM planning process; yet, most researchers view KM planning as the most difficult and complex part of KM implementation process. This paper aims to introduce a novel methodology to KM strategic planning comprehensively. The main contribution of this study is to develop a new integrated methodology for strategic planning that considers the strategy formulation aspects along with strategy execution and control aspects, synchronously.

Introduction

KM has been viewed as a strategic issue for the practitioners and academicians in recent years (Martinsons et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2016; Chen & Huang, 2012), and the importance of its implementation is dramatically increased for getting sustainable competitive advantage and innovation (Abu Bakar et al., 2016; Donate & de Pablo, 2015; Chen & Huang, 2010). Since the success of organizations is largely related to how effectively they manage their knowledge, the necessity of KM implementation is increasingly highlighted more than before (Wang et al., 2016). According to a report by APQC, which was conducted to examine the KM investments and to prioritize KM initiatives, of the 524 companies surveyed, 93% devoted a specific budget to KM projects (APQC, 2015), and the investments in the field of KM were increased in the studied organizations (Rhem, 2015). In spite of huge investments dedicated to KM projects, most of KM projects fail (Ale et al., 2014; Shankar et al., 2003; López-Nicolás & Meroño-Cerdán, 2011). The majority of investments in the field of KM do not meet organizations’ knowledge needs and expected benefits, and therefore, it leads to loss of investments (Ale et al., 2014). Some of the important reasons for failure of KM projects are the lack of an appropriate roadmap or methodology to implement KM initiatives (Kim et al., 2003; Wiig, 1998; Bolisani & Scarso, 2015), the lack of clear distinction between data, information and knowledge, ignorance of unique features of knowledge and knowledge workers (Kim et al., 2003), lack of clear KM strategies and vision (Beiryaei & Jamporazmay, 2010; Martinsons et al., 2017), lack of KM strategic alignment (Martinsons et al., 2017), ignorance of consequences of KM (López-Nicolás & Meroño-Cerdán, 2011).Many organizations use IT planning techniques to identify the core knowledge, design KM procedures and implement KM, while KM cannot rely solely on technical approaches due to the multi-dimensional nature of KM (Akram et al, 2015).

The concept of open innovation or using both inflows and outflows of knowledge to improve internal innovation [1] is well studied in Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) areas after the 2000s [2, 3]. The application of this concept has gone beyond the technical or everyday tasks such as open source software (OSS) or crowdsourcing in organisations. Recently, the open innovation concept has been combined with a decentralisation trend in strategic planning research [4], leading to a new concept called open strategy [5]. The new interdisciplinary concept of open strategy calls for increasing inclusiveness: receiving strategy ideas from people outside of the management team; transparency: providing people outside the management team with access to strategy input, process and outputs and use of IT tools in one or several activities required to formulate the strategic plan [6, 7]. Open strategy has been documented in many case studies, and various benefits are reported, including creating a dialogue about strategy [8], leveraging customers’ knowledge for strategy formation [9], increasing innovation and creativity [10, 11], better approval of strategy [12] and better firm performance [13-15]. Following reports in the literature about the usefulness of an open perspective for strategic planning, a vast body of literature has formed, and different aspects of this topic are investigated. For example, participation behaviour of stakeholders [14], strategising technologies [10, 16], associated risks [17] and outcomes of open strategy [18-20] have been widely reported in the literature on both the IS and management. Furthermore, numerous case studies of open strategy have been published [8, 21-23], which focus on potential opportunities and challenges in this topic area. Although the body of research around the open strategy topic has been useful to investigate many aspects of the phenomena, extant studies are primarily descriptive rather than prescriptive, and for this reason, only few process models [7, 24] are proposed, which claim to implement the notion of open strategy. Further, these studies are either theoretical or applicable only to a specific context and overlook important aspects such as specifications of a planning system. Consequently, we have little understanding of how an organisation can design and implement an Open Strategic Planning (OSP) system. This gap in our understanding is reflected in previous studies as ‘micro details of strategising’ using an open approach [6] and many other calls for prescriptive studies [7, 8, 12, 25]. The challenge in prescriptive OSP research is to prescribe how an OSP method can satisfy both social and technical requirements simultaneously [23, 26]. From a social perspective, an OSP methodology should focus on challenges such as commitment and disclosure in the strategy process [15], requiring a strong theoretical base. From a technical perspective, organisation of strategy resources including the stakeholder and planning system should fulfil the concept of OSP in terms of both process and artefact.

Strategy defines a company’s position, makes trade-offs, and forges the fit among activities (Porter, 1996). A strategy is the pattern or plan that integrates an organization’s major goals, policies, and action sequences into a cohesive whole (Mintzberg et al., 1996). Strategic planning is a component of strategy; it is an active option to cope with the future. Strategic planning is defined as “the process of developing and maintaining a strategic fit between the organization and its changing marketing opportunities” (Kotler and Murphy, 1981). Drucker (1993, p. 125) once noted that “strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.” In general, strategic planning may be interpreted as an organization’s process of defining its mission, or goal, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this mission and goal. Strategic planning was introduced into management by nonprofit organizations such as universities and foundations in the 1970s (Liu and Li, 2006, p. 4). The upsurge of strategic planning among higher education institutions (HEIs) was correlated to the changes in higher education in the latter period of the last century, including changing demographics, reduced funding, introducing new technology, increasing globalization and increasing scrutiny from the public sector (Leslie and Fretwell, 1996; Sporn, 1999; Keller, 2006). It became vital for a university to enhance its adaptability to its environment through innovative strategies and professional academic management in this period of change (Sporn, 1999, p. 6; Salminen, 2003). The research literature on university strategic planning correspondingly grew; many books and articles discussed the values and theoretical frameworks of strategic planning in the context of higher education, discussed the important factors in the process of formulating and implementing a plan, and provided guidelines for university planning (Keller, 1983; Shirley, 1983; Haas, 1980; Norris and Poulton, 1987; Buckland, 2009). There were also some discussions about specialized strategic plans. For instance, strategy of internationalizing universities was a hot topic in a global era (Knight, 1994; Teichler, 1999; Yonezawa et al., 2013).

Protected areas1 (PAs) are among the main strategies employed for the conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecological processes around the planet (Chape et al., 2005). Once established or created, the effectiveness of these PAs depends on their implementation, which includes planning and execution of protective actions, as well as recovery of degraded areas, ecosystem management, research and monitoring, receiving visitors, among others. Concerning the complexity and the lower degree of knowledge about the conservation of tropical biodiversity, PA managers in tropical countries are faced with tough challenges in planning and management (MacKinnon et al., 1986). Brazil is the largest tropical country and its territory as a whole hosts a world-class megadiversity (Mittermeier et al., 1997). On the other hand, two of its biomes e as Cerrado and Atlantic Forest hotspots e are facing the challenge of protecting their biodiversity and ecosystems against serious threats (Mittermeier et al., 2005). Brazil currently has a network of nearly 2000 PAs (954 federal, 765 state and 230 municipal) (CNUC, 2017). About 240 MPs were set for Brazilian PAs (ICMBio, 2017). It has been found that the first MPs drafted in Brazil were weakly applied or misapplied, failing in their purpose of guiding PA management, besides being quite expensive. Even with MPs, most PAs face problems such as lack of supervision, deforestation, forest fires, precarious land tenure status, conflicting activities and lack of human and financial resources. So, MPs do not guarantee effectiveness in PA management (Dourojeanni, 2005). The effectiveness of PAs is evaluated by managers with a method called Rapid Assessment and Priorization of Protected Area Management (RAPPAM),2 specifically with the Management Effectiveness Index (Ervin, 2003). In 2010, the latest analysis assessed the effectiveness of 292 Brazilian federal protected areas. Despite the progress recorded by this effort, more than 77% of PAs were found to still have average or low effectiveness (ICMBio, 2011). To guide their actions, PAs agencies worldwide use management plans (MPs) as main guidelines for the required actions and standards for conservation and use of protected ecosystems (Thomas and Middleton, 2008; Medeiros and Pereira, 2011).