When the leadership team defines an organization’s vision, they look toward the future and identify the goals and objectives they want to achieve. This is the start of strategic planning. The next step is establishing the sequence in which to realize those goals and objectives.

Once the vision is defined, then the practical work begins, and strategic planning templates can facilitate that work. ProjectManager is not only powerful project and portfolio management software but also has over 100 free project and portfolio management templates for Excel and Word, including these strategic planning templates.

Why Should You Use Strategic Planning Templates?

Strategic planning templates are useful tools for project management offices (PMOs) and portfolio and program managers who oversee multiple projects and ensure they’re aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. They cover everything involved in the strategic planning process, from defining the vision statement to creating a roadmap and more.

Using premade strategic planning templates is also helpful because there’s no busy work involved. All you have to do is add relevant details. Strategic planning templates are consistent, which helps when archiving strategic planning documentation. This makes it easier to reference those documents when needed and review them when creating a new long-term plan.

While strategic planning templates help get you started, once you execute the strategic plan, you’ll see their limitations. These are, after all, static documents that must be manually updated which can impact collaboration. Strategic plans are implemented across the organization and departments must work together, share resources and prioritize the common goal. In reality, strategic planning templates aren’t designed to be that dynamic.

Portfolio management software goes where strategic planning templates cannot. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software with powerful strategic roadmaps that collect all your projects and displays them on one Gantt chart. You can manage resources, track time and manage tasks for all your projects in one place. Our roadmap can be filtered by assignee, project manager or customer to help you make forecasts. You can view which projects are opened and who’s assigned to what tasks and highlight key metrics to keep stakeholders informed. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Free Strategic Planning Templates for Excel and Word

If you’re not ready to upgrade yet, ProjectManager also has over 100 free project management templates for Excel and Word that can help you with every phase of your project and across multiple industries. Below, we’ve listed 12 free strategic planning templates that can help you get started in reaching your strategic goals. Download them now.

1. Strategic Plan Template

Everything you need to outline your strategic plan is in this free strategic plan template for Word. When completed, you’ll have defined a strategic target and how to get the entire organization there. It will also show how the organization will track progress to ensure its goals are met over a specific period.

Our free strategic plan template has a place to define your vision and mission statements, and even make a SWOT analysis to identify the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You can list your business goals, marketing and operational plans, financial projections and the team that will be tasked with meeting your strategic goals.

2. Vision Statement Template

Strategic planning templates are nothing if they’re not driven by a clear vision. An organization’s vision is defined and distributed on a document called the vision statement. It succinctly explains the meaning and purpose of the organization, helping everyone understand its long-term goals.

Download our free vision statement template to kickstart the brainstorming that will generate a powerful vision statement for your organization. The vision statement template is made up of five steps, with each associated with a question, to walk you through the process of coming up with the right vision statement for your organization.

3. Strategy Roadmap Template

Once you have a vision, you know where you want to be over the next five or so years. Getting there requires a strategy roadmap, which is a tool that visualizes the major phases in your long-term plan to achieve your vision. This is one of the more important strategic planning templates in that it helps you make important decisions in terms of strategy, resource allocation and more.

Using our free strategy roadmap template for Excel gives you a high-level overview of the project or multiple projects you’ll be managing. On the left-hand side, a spreadsheet lists your tasks, start and end dates, including duration. Once those are imputed, they automatically populate the horizontal bar chart to the right. You can color-code the timeline to make it easier to distinguish different projects or phases.

4. Strategy Map Template

A strategy map is another strategic planning template that’s also a visual tool. It’s used to show the cause-and-effect of an organization’s strategic objectives by breaking them into four perspectives: strategic, financial, customer and business process. The strategy map template then communicates these objectives to the departments in an organization.

Our free strategy map template for Excel is customizable so you can identify your key objectives and place them appropriately across the four perspectives, with arrows showing the cause-and-effect relationships between them. This makes it clear how one objective from one perspective will influence the other objects from different perspectives.

5. SWOT Analysis Template

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It’s an analytic tool that organizations use to assess their competitive position and develop long-term planning strategies. This makes it an ideal addition to your strategic planning templates.

Our free SWOT analysis template for Word is a useful strategic planning template as it’s divided into four quadrants and four descriptors. Strengths are positive and internal to an organization, while weaknesses are negative and internal. Opportunities are positive, but external, while threats are negative and external. Using the template helps you sort through this data to inform your strategic plan.

6. Smart Goals Template

When using strategic planning templates, the first thing you need to define are goals. But those goals should be SMART, as in specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Using our free smart goals template for Word will help ensure you can achieve your long-term goals.

Our SMART goals template is a simple, but powerful tool for defining goals. It’s broken up into the five categories of SMART goals. For each, there are a series of questions to answer. This will lead you to the right goals for your organization and its business environment.

7. Organizational Chart Template

Once you have all your strategic planning templates filled out and you’re ready to implement the plan, there’s one last thing you need to do; define the internal structure of your organization. Creating a visual flowchart clarifies who has power over what and who to report or request guidance from.

Our free organizational chart template for Excel will help your organization run better, which is essential if you want to reach your long-term goals. The tree diagram design makes it easy to see department heads and those who report under them.

8. Action Plan Template

A strategic goal is just an idea until it’s executed. The ability to turn those goals into actionable tasks requires an action plan, which is a strategic planning template that lists tasks, duration and costs all in one document.

Our free action plan template for Excel helps you organize tasks and subtasks by phase and who’s assigned to them. In the timeline section, add start and end dates. Be sure to include the materials required to execute those tasks and their associated costs.

9. Resource Plan Template

Getting everyone up to speed on strategic plans is one thing, scheduling their work is another. That’s why having a resource plan is critical when assembling your strategic planning templates. Using our free resource plan template for Excel helps you schedule your resources.

The template has a column to list your resources and another to identify their department and the total number of hours assigned to each resource, including their rate and total cost. The other part of the template is a weekly calendar that allows you to map when you need your resources.

10. Balanced Scorecard Template

Another strategic planning template is the balanced scorecard template. This document gets its name by evaluating strategic and more traditional financial measures to provide balance in the scorecard. It helps align business activities with the vision and strategy of the organization.

The template itself includes categories such as financial, customer, internal processes and learning, although you can add or remove categories as needed. From there, add strategic objectives and key performance indicators to define and set goals, determining how to meet them along the way. As a result of this template, internal and external communication improves while teams can monitor organizational performance against strategic goals.

11. KPI Dashboard Template

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are another good measure of strategic performance as they are quantifiable. If you’re not sure what the goals are for the project or even for the organization as a whole, how can you achieve them? Use this KPI dashboard template to monitor and analyze KPIs to track performance.

It’s useful for tracking individual, team and department performance in terms of timelines, tasks, workload analysis, resource planning and more. As more data is added to this strategic planning template, it’s easier to identify and address trends that can negatively impact the project.

12. Operational Plan Template

An operational plan highlights the specific actions and resources needed to achieve the organization’s strategic goals. Usually, the operational plan includes additional details on activities, timelines, objectives, responsibilities and needed resources. The goal is to help deliver on the business’s strategic initiatives.

The template itself can cover daily, weekly or monthly timeframes. It’s more than a strategic plan, it also outlines the timelines, scope of work, processes and more. Use this free strategic planning template to outline the metrics that measure the progress of the work to keep it on track.

How ProjectManager Helps With Strategic Planning

Strategic planning templates are helpful. They can organize your thoughts and focus ideas, but they fall short when it comes to planning, managing and tracking your projects. They can’t track details in real time and pull you away from more important work as you manually update each strategic planning template. Plus, they’re not collaborative. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software that helps you with strategic planning and monitoring its execution in real time to keep you on track to meet your long-term goals.

Manage Resources and Labor Costs

When you onboard your team to our software, you can set their availability, including PTO, vacation and even global holidays for remote workers. This makes it easy to assign them work. Then toggle over to the workload chart, which is color-coded to make it easy to see your team’s workload. If some are overallocated, just balance their workload right from the chart. Our secure timesheets streamline payroll but also allow you to track labor costs and keep to your budget. You can also see how far each team member is in completing their work.

Track the Progress and Costs of Strategic Initiatives

You can track your resources, costs, time and more with our real-time portfolio dashboards. They give you an overview of your projects, like having a status report whenever you want one. Our project and portfolio dashboards automatically collect live data and display it on easy-to-read graphs and charts. There’s no time-consuming and complicated setup as with lightweight alternatives. If you want more details, use our customizable reports, which filter data to show only what you want to see. They can also be shared to keep stakeholders informed.

Creating action plans to reach your strategic goals can be done on our robust Gantt charts or roadmaps, but teams across different departments are going to need different tools to execute their tasks. Our software has multiple project views, from the visual workflow of kanban boards to task lists, sheet and calendar views. Teams can work how they want. All project views update together so everyone is always working on the same page.

ProjectManager is online project and portfolio management software that connects teams whether they’re in the office, in the field or anywhere in the world. They can share files, comment at the task level and stay updated with email and in-app notifications. Join teams at Avis, Nestle and Siemens who use our software to deliver successful projects. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.