IT Governance Blog

CobiT definition:

Create a portfolio of tactical IT plans that are derived from the IT strategic plan. The tactical plans should address IT-enabled
programme investments, IT services and IT assets. The tactical plans should describe required IT initiatives, resource requirements,
and how the use of resources and achievement of benefits will be monitored and managed. The tactical plans should be sufficiently
detailed to allow the definition of project plans. Actively manage the set of tactical IT plans and initiatives through analysis of
project and service portfolios.

Bill says,

The differences between Strategic Plans, Tactical Plans, and Project Plans can sometimes be difficult to draft, particularly given CobiT’s mandate of ensuring these plans are “sufficiently detailed” to drive the plans that arise from it. It is very easy to draft a strategic plan at a level of detail that would actually preclude needing a tactical plan - if you find yourself in those shoes it means your strategic plan is too detailed.

So let’s look at a hypothetical example.

Let’s say that one of our company’s objectives is to improve customer satisfaction by 10%, as measured by our quarterly customer satisfaction survey. Good, we have a pretty S.M.A.R.T objective here, and we can immediately think of a number of IT initiatives that could positively impact this goal. As I draft my strategic plan I need to consider, at a high level, what we within IT can do to help the company meet this goal. My strategy will be broken out by the various touch points we have with our customers. From Technical Support, where they interact with us through email and the telephone. From Finance, where we send them easy to understand invoices. From Development, where we make software that is easier to use.

As I put the strategic plan together I meet with the VPs of each of these areas, and get agreement on how improvements in these areas would positively impact our goal. We define some objectives and measurements for each area, and I allocate a percentage of my budget to each.

For the tactical plans I then take each of these strategic areas and break them out into how we will actually address them. Let’s look at Technical Support. Suppose we have agreed that there are a few things we can do to help Technical Support better serve it’s customers. We can streamline the IVR menus so a customer gets to an agent quicker. We can enable a searchable knowledge base for our customers. And we can introduce an email response program that let’s customers know we have received their email and have created an incident for them.

For each of these tactical responses meant to address the overall strategic objective, we need to similarly define resources and budget. These tactical plans would then easily lend themselves to having specific project plans built. And best of all, project team members have an immediate and clear understanding of how their project ties to corporate objectives - it’s a very clear path from project, to tactical plans, to IT strategic plans, to corporate objective. It ties together very nicely.

So the fifth step in building the Strategic IT Plan is to create the IT Tactical Plans, which addresses how we are going to address our strategic goals at a sufficient level so that project plans can be drafted and that there is a clear tie back to the corporate objectives driving our strategic plans.