Planning

A planning action or forecasting is built around several assumptions. These relate to the environmental and organizational factors which are ever-changing. Strategies once formulated, are not translated into action immediately. The implementation process itself takes a lot of time. During the period, changes might occur that have major implications for the strategy’s ultimate success. As a result, the traditional post action controls should be replaced by some early warning systems that help managers rectify things as the strategies are implemented. The most important purpose of control with an action plan is to help the top management achieve organizational goals through monitoring and evaluating the strategic management process.

The strategic management process results in an assessment of organizational environment the establishment of organizational mission and goals, the development of ways to deal with competition in order to reach these goals and fulfil the organization’s mission and a plan for translating organizational strategy into action. There are four types of strategic control:

1. Premise control

2. Implementation control

3. Strategic surveillance

4. Strategic alert control

Premise control

As mentioned above, strategy is built around certain assumptions about environmental and organizational factors. Premise control is designed to check systematically and continuously whether the premises on which the strategy is based are still valid. If an important premise is no longer valid, the strategy may have to be changed. For instance, the slowdown in the economy in late 1990s has forced commercial vehicle manufacturers (Ashok Leyland, TELCO) to trim their workforce shift to a 4 day work week with reduced working hours and initiate several other cost cutting measures simultaneously. They did not wait for the economy to pick up nor continued with their traditional ways of working. Instead, they have tried to take corrective action at the right time...