Planning

Planning is preparing for tomorrow, today. It provides direction and unity of purpose for organizations and their subsystems. When planning, managers have five key responsibilities. Construct, review, and/or rewrite their organization’s mission. Identify and analyze their opportunities. Establish the goals they wish to achieve. Identify, analyze, and select the course or courses of action required to reach their goals. Determine resources they will need to achieve their goals. When developing a plan, all managers, regardless of their organizational level, follow some kind of step-by-step process to guide their efforts. The steps in the planning process are setting objectives, analyzing and evaluating the environments, identifying the alternatives, evaluating the alternatives, selecting the best solution, implementing the plan, and controlling and evaluating the results.

When setting objectives, middle and operating managers focus and commit the attention and energies of their respective personnel, divisions, and departments for several months into the future. The selection of objectives (and the courses of action to achieve them) is influenced in part by the organization’s mission and values; the strategic plans and goals; the standing plans; the environmental conditions; the availability of resources; and the philosophies, ethics, accumulated experience, and expertise of its managers. Before being finalized, each objective should be specific and measurable, realistic and challenging, focused on key result areas, cover a specific period and reward performance.

Once objectives are established, managers must analyze their current situations and environments to determine what resources they will have available and what other limiting factors such as company policies they must consider as they evaluate possible courses of actions or tactics. When assessing the internal environment, managers must consider what human, material, financial, time and informational...