Strategic Planning and Operations Management
Strategic Planning and Operations
Know the strategic planning cycle: environmental assessment (SWOT, PESTLE), mission/vision, goal setting, strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Understand tools-Porter's five forces, value chain, balanced scorecard (financial, customer, internal process, learning/growth), and gap analysis.
Operations concepts: capacity planning, demand forecasting, scheduling, patient flow, throughput, bottlenecks (theory of constraints), and queuing (wait times rise nonlinearly as utilization approaches capacity). Know Lean operations and process mapping. Understand supply chain, inventory (just-in-time versus safety stock), and the trade-off between efficiency and resilience.
Service operations: variability in demand and duration, the role of buffers, and why high utilization increases delays. Distinguish strategic (long-term direction) from operational (day-to-day execution) decisions.
Traps: treating SWOT as a strategy rather than an input; picking a tactic when the question asks for strategy; ignoring that improving a non-bottleneck step does not increase throughput; assuming higher utilization is always better.
Worked rule of thumb: throughput is set by the bottleneck-improve the constraint first. For wait-time questions, remember that as utilization rises above roughly 80–85%, queue lengths grow sharply, so adding capacity or smoothing demand is the lever.
Align operations with strategy: measures on the balanced scorecard should trace back to strategic goals, and implementation requires clear ownership, resources, and feedback.