Mgt330 - Management Planning

Management Planning Paper

Management Theory, Practice, and Application

MGT/330

August 16, 2010

Rochelle Allen

Management Planning

Halliburton was founded in 1919 by Erle P. Halliburton. The company is one of the world’s largest providers of services and products to the energy industry. Halliburton’s interesting and proud heritage shows a continuous focus on expansion and innovation. Halliburton now has two large operating groups, the Energy Services Group (ESG) employs 35,000 people, and Kellogg-Brown-Root (KBR) has 65,000 employees. The company’s vision is to be “the real-time knowledge company serving the upstream petroleum industry (Ash, 2005).” As a global powerhouse, Halliburton has had many successes and failures. Through ignorance of their social responsibility, the company faced a series of legal battles and ethical practice violations that put them in the spot light for many years. Even with all of their problems, Halliburton continues to be the leading supplier to the petroleum and oil industry.

With more than 100,000 employees in 70 countries, Halliburton goes to great lengths to plan every aspect of the organization. In 2001, Halliburton implemented a Knowledge Management (KM) system “founded on communities of practice that ensures its long-term sustainability by building tangible bottom line value (Ash, 2005).” The KM system set the stage for departmentalization. Within three years, the management team was divided into function units that included, “Supply Chain, Management Systems, IT, Marketing and Strategy (Ash, 2005),” and several others. The Knowledge Management system has proven to work well for the organization.

On another front, legal and ethical standards influence how companies do business and whether there is a positive or negative effect. The planning functions of management of Halliburton are not exempt from these issues. In 2002, the planning efforts made by Halliburton management were impacted by “the...