STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

Strategic planning is a backbone support to strategic management and it is a major process in the conduct of strategic management. The importance of strategic planning can be explained from four points of view including environmental scanning, strategy formulation, and linking goals to budgets and strategic planning as a process. The main objective of the study was to assess strategic planning and its contribution to National Cement Share Company (NCSC) performance. \In this study, data was obtained through questionnaire and interactive interviews with 65 respondents respectively from top, middle and line managers and 2 top level managers as key informants. The study has investigated the practices and challenges in the course of designing, implementing and over sighting the plan in the ex-post implementation in order to approach the problem. However, results show that there was a gap in participating wider employees and stakeholders in the course of designing the plan. This study also shows that the implementation of the Strategic Plan has resulted in positive changes with regard to revenue collection, efficient service delivery and increased desire for qualified manpower.