Posted in Business Management, Organisational behaviour, Strategy
on Mar 2nd, 2014 | 0 comments
“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” – Alan Lakein.
Planning is absolutely essential and every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution and gives 100 percent return on energy. We compare the advantages of planning against the consequences for your better understanding.
Let’s See the Advantages of Planning First
- Facilitates opportunity analysis and presents an awareness of the external environment
- Minimizes cost as it takes into account all the contributing and limiting factors
- Increases efficiency
- Refines culture of an organization
- Provides a good direction
- Also establishes several measures of control
- Elicits commitment
Disadvantages of Planning
- Time consuming
- Involves excessive paper work
- Some times over emphasizes only the objectives
- Planning may become lop sided as it entirely depends on the mind set and attitude of people concerned with planning
- Planning premises may not be fully reliable
Steps to Make Planning Effective
- Every organization should have a separate planning department. A corporate planning department will take care of all the functions of an organization under one heading.
- Planning must be all pervasive and even the work force at the bottom level should understand the importance of planning and the planning perspective of the management.
- The goals must be verifiable and clear
- Give managers adequate tools and the freedom to trial and error
- The long term and short term goals should be combined together to form a inter locked system and must be viewed as one big single network.
- Goal setting must be practiced – participation by the employees must be made compulsory
- A small idea could turn out into a big plan- don’t ignore suggestions from your subordinates and term them “silly.”
What is Strategic Planning
- Strategic planning has a long term perspective and takes into account the extended time horizon.
- There may not be any immediate impact arising out of strategic planning, but the results can be experienced in the long run.
- It gives effort on vital areas. When the size of organizations is huge, they are broken down into STRATEGIC BUSINESS UNITS, treating them as individual businesses for ease of operation and decision making.
- It is a tailor made approach to match the functioning of an organization to the external environment for meeting the changes in the future.
So, i is crystal clear that the advantages of planning outweigh the disadvantages and good plans never fail.
