The process of strategic, tactical and operational planning are ongoing processes that a company goes through to plan how their business is going to operate and function in the competitive market. There are all kinds of factors that influence these planning processes. Most of them are just basic things you think about when you think about creating a plan for a business. Things like: market and changes in the market, time of year (since many companies are season this can be a major factor in the planning process), cost of supplies, legal issues (to include laws that affect the companies basic business processes), competition, employee related issues (insurance, training, turnover rates, pay scales etc), and product lines and changes to that product line.

Here I wanted to provide some extra information on contingency plans as they are a little different from the other plans in that the other plans are how the company plans to run the business on a day to day basis.

Contingency Plans - What they are:

"A contingency plan is a well thought out, alternate or radical course of action that avoids disruptions in normal business operations due to any type of operational error. Contingency planning is a non-linear process that cannot be performed by a single task force or business unit.

The planning process must rather be approached as a centrally coordinated, yet highly distributed series of facilitation exercises. In order for management to successfully initiate a contingency planning project, they must recognize and incorporate two key sets of deliverables; the bottom-up, tactical piece of the plan and the top-down, business-driven component of the plan.

The bottom-up process assesses tactical impacts of a system problem, project overrun, data interface error or supply chain interruption. Top-down contingency planning deals with failures in mission critical functions and the ability of business units to work around or deal with those failures to ensure business continuity. Integrating bottom-up plans and dependencies with top-down, business-driven contingencies allows an enterprise to:

Ensure that critical organizational components have contingency plans;
Enable contingency cost and failure probability analysis; and
Verify that bottom-up plans do not conflict with top-down business strategies. "http://www.systemtransformation.com/cpoverview.htm

Contingency plans - are just what they say - plans developed in business to help in the event of a problem with the strategic plan of the company. These are also known as "in case of an emergency" plans in business. Factors that influence contigency planning include: financial standing, employee overturn rates, stock prices, insurance policies, market changes, time of year etc.

Here is another references you can look at and use for help with answering these questions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning
I have also attached a great write up on operational planning for you to review

2. First lets look at what strategic planning is and why it is used. I think this information will help you better understand managements role in strategic planning.

".Simply put, strategic planning determines where an organization is going over the next year or more, how it's going to get there and how it'll know if it got there or not. The focus of a strategic plan is usually on the entire organization, while the focus of a business plan is usually on a particular product, service or program.

There are a variety of perspectives, models and approaches used in strategic planning. The way that a strategic plan is developed depends on the nature of the organization's leadership, culture of the organization, complexity of the organization's environment, size of the organization, expertise of planners, etc. For example, there are a variety of strategic planning models, including goals-based, issues-based, organic, scenario (some would assert that scenario planning is more a technique than model), etc. Goals-based planning is probably the most common and starts with focus on the organization's mission (and vision and/or values), goals to work toward the mission, strategies to achieve the goals, and action planning (who will do what and by when). Issues-based strategic planning often starts by examining issues facing the organization, strategies to address those issues, and action plans. Organic strategic planning might start by articulating the organization's vision and values and then action plans to achieve the vision while adhering to those values. Some planners prefer a particular approach to planning, eg, appreciative inquiry. Some plans are scoped to one year, many to three years, and some to five to ten years into the future. Some plans include only top-level information and no action plans. Some plans are five to eight pages long, while others can be considerably longer." http://www.managementhelp.org/plan_dec/str_plan/str_plan.htm

With this said, it is clear to see that the management of the organziation plays a key role in the strategic planning as they are the ones responsible for making sure that plan is carried out, meets the needs of the customers, and it designed to enhance the company's mission.

If you are going to use your company in wireless telecommunications, look at their strategic plan and find which aspects that management is going to be directly responsible for and this will help you analyze how they affect the strategic planning process.