Strategic Planning

Every year, crises cause extensive and occasionally irreversible damage to countries and human societies affecting communities, economies, and environments. Identifying, proper planning, and optimum managing of crises are among the priorities of government programs and procedures. With the expansion and complexity of the societies and variety and innumerability of crisis-making factors, mere use of traditional methods of reinforcement and crisis management would not be efficient. One of the most important ideas brought about in the present decade for crisis management and urban planning is creating resilient cities in the face of various crises by increasing their capacity in all aspects. The significance of this standpoint is the comprehensive look at crisis-making factors, controlling crises, and reduction of vulnerability, particularly in human resources, which speeds the resilience process. Although all infrastructural or environmental, economic, social-cultural, and organizational or institutional aspects have been taken into consideration in resilience, the focus on social and cultural capacitating in each and every citizen would be greatly effectual in a developing country such as Iran. This land endures weak infrastructures and structures, but enjoys a rich cultural and national support from the citizens’ creativity and participation that can help us with achieving the goal of flexibility in crisis management by spending the least amount of time and money. In the present paper, the experiences of other nations and novel concepts such as creative cities, resistant development, principles of futures study and planning, and process-oriented strategic management have been studied along with the current state of Iran. Finally, the method of “Strategic Futures Study and Planning based on GIS” is suggested as a suitable approach in crisis management planning. In the author’s point of view, complete use of this method could help us significantly reduce the losses of disasters and pioneer in the field of crisis management among developing countries.<br /> <strong> </strong>

Rapid changes and competitions in today's world have shifted the role of governmental enterprises into regulating and directing activities. This has led to the need for the analysis of internal/ external situations and the revision of strategic planning of such companies. The Iranian Oil Terminals Company, as one of the National Iranian Oil Company subsidiaries, has developed its vision, mission, and strategic plan. In this paper, the strategic planning was fulfilled for the Procurement and Supply system of IOTC, which has the role of supporting the primary activities of the company by sourcing, purchasing, warehousing, and delivering the requested materials. In this regard, different models of strategic planning were reviewed to design a suitable approach for strategy formulation. The adopted framework was implemented using the balanced scorecard approach and the results were presented step by step in the paper. . . . . . . . . . . .

This quantitative study aimed to investigate the combined effects of two types of strategic planning, namely collaborative and teacher-led planning conditions and task complexity on Iranian intermediate language learners' oral production in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To achieve this purpose, 90 EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling from a language institute in Shiraz, Iran, and randomly assigned to two control and four experimental groups. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design in the form of pretest, treatment, and posttest. In the first step, all participants took part in a speaking pretest in which they were required to narrate a story based on a series of picture description tasks. While the experimental groups underwent 10 treatment sessions of picture description task performance along with two planning types i.e., teacher-led and collaborative planning conditions, the control groups were not allowed to plan the task performance. In the last session, the language learners took a posttest whose results were compared with those of the pretest. The findings revealed that the language learners in the collaborative planning groups outperformed the other groups in terms of both fluency and complexity. Further, teacher-led groups did better than the other groups in terms of accuracy. This study carries crucial implications for EFL teachers, material developers, syllabus designers, and speaking skill examiners.

Experiences from urban development plans and assessments of their concrete and tangible results in the past decades indicate lack of adequate success of our urbanization system to responding needs of our citizens. This has resulted in need to find a fundamental solution to transforming the centralized system into decentralized. Recent changes in regard to a change of approach from master plan to strategic planning has resulted in an increased sensitivity with regard to enhancement of urban management in addition to the opinion that strategic planning is not in itself a credible replacement for technocratic master planning (top-down) and is not on its own sufficient for sustainable development. In this article, we employ methods of actualization and content analysis to compare the common features of two issues in Iran and subsequently, with an emphasis on correction of structure of urban management system, the concepts of participation of citizens, government, private sector and civic society and enhancement of “good urban governance” with “strategic planning approach” are discussed as keys to the question of solid development.“Public participation in decision-making, accountability, equity and efficiency”, defines both fundamental principles of good urban governance and characteristics of strategic planning and is essentials of a constant environmental, social and economic development.

The purpose of the present study is to identify and prioritize spiritual-based tourism strategies in Qom province. The present study is interpretive from the philosophical foundations point of view and is applied from the point of view of orientation. It is also a survey in terms of data collection and from a methodological point of view, it is qualitative. The statistical population of the study is the experts and managers in the field of tourism and the sampling method is judgmental. 10 experts were selected from among the samples. In order to carry out the research, internal and external factors affecting the spiritual-based tourism in Qom province were identified through reviewing the literature and interviewing experts. After the internal and external factors were screened, 15 internal and 14 external factors remained. In addition, the nature of internal and external factors was identified in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and the most effective factors were determined by using the DEMATEL technique for preparing the SWOT table. With identifying the final list of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, strategies were prioritized from the perspective of research experts by ARAS method. Three strategies to support provincial headquarters, banks and entrepreneurship funds from web-based tourism businesses and social networks, defining research priorities of tourism-related organizations based on civil society support, and strengthening  training programs to justify diversity in the community and its benefits had the highest priority.

This study examined the effect of rehearsal, strategic, and online planning on the intermediate undergraduate EFL learners’ writing complexity, accuracy, fluency (CAF), lexical variety, and the cognitive psychological performance of attentional allocation to linguistic aspects during planning . To this end, 80 intermediate university students were randomly divided into three experimental groups and one control group. The participants’ performance was compared based on measures of Wigglesworth and Storch’s (2009) fluency, Storch and Wigglesworth’s (2007) accuracy, Foster and Skehan’s (1999) complexity, McKee , Malvern, and Richards’ (2000) vocd-D model of lexical diversity. The study focused on rehearsal, strategic, and online planning in argumentative writing tasks. Retrospective interviews were conducted right after task performance to examine the participants' attentional allocation under three planning-time conditions. It was revealed that rehearsal task planning resulted in higher CAF and lexical variety in comparison to the other groups. Noticeable variation was also evidenced in the participants’ attentional allocation in terms of CAF across different time planning conditions. It was also shown that the learners paid more attention to the conceptualization of ideas during pre-task planning through sentences or clauses while performing a task. Little attention was paid to formulizing complex or accurate utterances. The findings have numerous pedagogical implications for EFL teachers, university instructors, and EFL students.

The inefficiency of the national security system is one of the biggest threats to Ukraine's national security. The strategic planning in the field of security and defense has designed to identify the means, including the future structure of forces, that would allow the institutions of the defense and security sector to effectively deal with potential future threats. The purpose of this study is development of theoretical and practical measures to increase the effectiveness of strategic management of national security processes on the basis of goal setting, forecasting and planning in the context of informatization of society. The relevance of this study is due to the needlegal regulation and improvement of the state system of strategic planning of national security of Ukraine. To achieve the goal of the study was used special scientific methods of legal knowledge. The results of the analysis showedwhat in the basis ensuring national security must rely on the principle of systematization, which means that the security and defense sector of Ukraine is considered as a single object of forecasting and planning. This study substantiates the main directions systemic reform of the security and defense sector, which has carried out in Ukraine to ensure the protection of the constitutional order, sovereignty, territorial integrity of the state in the face of armed aggression. The priorities should be implemented through key tasks, such as the establishment of a comprehensive strategic analysis of military threats to Ukraine's national security, coordination of intelligence activities, development of joint intelligence capabilities of the defense forces in order to obtain complete and reliable warning information for timely decision-making guaranteeing the military security of the state.

In this research, we try to determine the strategic planning and the most appropriate strategic options for hotels through a case study, considering the current situation of hotel industry in Iran. For this purpose, Parsian Evan hotel, a four star located in Tehran was selected as a case study. Initially, the mission and vision of the hotel were expressed; then a questionnaire was prepared for investigating the internal and external environment of hotel and determining its strengths, threats and opportunities of the hotel and distributed among 5 senior managers in Evin Hotel. In the next step, the information of the questionnaires was extracted and the evaluation matrices of internal and external factors were formulated based on that information. Next, the related strategies were provided after comparing the weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats. The most important strategic options were identified based on the views and comments of the above-mentioned senior managers and consultations with two of the elites of the hotel industry in Iran, according to which the SWOT matrix and internal and external factors (IE) were prepared. Finally, the related strategies were introduced and the quantitative strategy planning matrix (QSPM) was formulated by identifying the hotel’ position in the IE matrix. The results of the matrices indicated that Evin Hotel is currently in an aggressive position and can use the most important strategies related to the comparison of strengths and opportunities (SO) to overcome the competitors. In addition to Evin hotel, the top managers of other hotels can also use the presented process for their strategic planning according to their capabilities.

Tourism has been known as the largest service industry in the world in terms of income, so that its growth has led to a lot of social and economic changes. The tourism industry is considered as one of the pillars of economic development in the postmodern period, that plays an important role in the economic development of societies and is one of the most important components of sustainable income. The development of the tourism industry for developing countries, which have encountered with problems such as high unemployment rate, limitation of currency resources and single-product economy, has great importance. On the other hand, tourism can have a great effect on national production and employment of country in the future years as a powerful economic industry. The tourism industry has been more and more considered seriously by the policy makers and planners of the country and the development of tourism industry is turning a national and universal request due to the fact that the reduction in national production and the consequent increase in unemployment as the main economic problem of the country is raised in our country. Hence, the tourism industry can be considered as an economic perspective. In this regard, the AHP-SWOT technique was used in order to identify the effective factors, internal accelerators and retardants (strengths and weaknesses) and the external accelerators and retardants (opportunities and threats) of the tourism development of the District 12 of Tehran and the presentation of scientific and practical strategies and solutions in regard of tourism development. Quantitative research models output indicates that the final score of the internal factors evaluation is 3.48 and the final score related to the external factors evaluation is 3.48. Therefore, considering these outputs, acceptable strategies for planning and strategic management of tourism development in the district 12 according to the placement in the first quarter of the internal and external matrix, are aggressive strategies. Therefore, the strategies of tourism development and tourism attraction in this district should be developed in such a way that seek to fix the weaknesses, eliminate the threats to the district and, with the comprehensive and strategic planning approach take appropriate measures and strategies in order to optimize the current situation and organize the tourism industry in this district. .

S trategic planning, as the las t s tage of the development of urban planning, s trives to create consensus among citizens regarding urban development adaptability and participative techniques. Urban residents are recognized as s takeholders in the planning process and will take part in its final formulation. In addition to discussing issues like reducing poverty, city planning, and environmental problems, the CDS prioritizes increasing economic competitiveness. This s tudy measured good urban governance, livability, bankability, and competitiveness indicators for Mallard. A descriptive-analytical approach has been used to accomplish this. The mos t crucial feature of this s trategy is that it views cities as the engine of economic growth and directly affects governance, local economic growth, and poverty alleviation.The purpose of this article is to review and evaluate the components of the city development s trategy in Mallard. The data were processed using SPSS and AMOS software, one-sample T-tes ts, and other tools. The results show that while the components of bankability (2.20) and competitiveness (2.42) are in a somewhat better position than the other components, the components of livability (1.70) and good urban governance (18.82) are in a much poorer position.