I was troubled a few days ago when I heard a development manager talking about strategic initiatives and “tactical” solutions. I felt very strongly that the implied meaning was low cost, low quality solutions.
I am very grateful to Tim over at thedwick for writing that we should essentially reconsider that implied meaning. I would go even further, every single solution implemented by a development team is tactical in nature. Tactical does not so much refer to scope or quality as it does to the amount of control one has on the outcome and the time scale.
Strategic is when you have some level of influence on the goals and outcome but no real control. Tactical is that you may have some influence on the goals and full control on the outcome through your actions (your actions therefore have to adapt to local conditions and oppositions and overcome them). A strategy usually results in plenty of tactical decisions and actions that do not need to be fully defined in the plan.
The second aspect of the difference between strategic and tactical is the time scale. Strategic plans are liable to change as the environment changes until the strategic goals are achieved. The strategy will also change based on the tactical situations reported. Some goals may be modified or even abandoned if it appears they have become too expensive to achieve. On the tactical side, the goal is usually firmly defined and achievable in a relatively short time frame (a few hours to a few days) which leaves little room for changes.
One corollary of these two aspects is that when a tactical goal is achieved there is no reason to come back to it to achieve it again but better. To use a military analogy, let us imagine that the goal is to take a house in a city. The unit blows a couple of houses around to remove resistance and then storms the objective. Three weeks later, after the city officials complained, the unit is asked to rebuild the two houses and asked to put back the opponents that were in them and then take the same house again without destroying any other buildings in the city. That is exactly what is usually implied when a development manager talks about a tactical solution.
PS: It will be obvious that, in the analogy, the tactical goal has actually changed but let’s keep it simple.