A Quick Guide to Strategic Planning for Busy IT Professionals

by Al Zyck

If you're new to strategic planning, it can be challenging. There are lots of dimensions to understand and many trade-offs to consider.

This guide is a practical primer to get you up to speed quickly on strategic planning and help you become a functional partner in your organization's strategic planning process. It's targeted towards IT Executives, Enterprise Architects, and IT Business Analysts.

The content started with some post graduate work I had done in strategic planning. It has evolved over the last 15 years from real-life, hands-on strategic planning experience as I filled senior IT management and Enterprise Architecture roles.

We'll start with basic concepts and tools used in strategic planning. Then we'll look at how those tools come together at the organization/enterprise level. I'll also cover what it means for IT to be "strategically aligned" with the business using a visual tool to demonstrate alignment. Finally there's a simple methodology you can use to create a strategic plan for your IT department or IT team.

79 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 8, 2013