The planning process takes place in the context of the environment.

Managers must develop a complete

understanding of this context in order to define the organization's mission and develop its strategic,
tactical, and operational goals and plans.

Organizational goals

Objectives are important to the effectiveness of the organization, and they serve a number of purposes,
several different types of goals, all of which must be managed appropriately, and several different types
of managers must be involved in goal setting.

Purpose of Goals

Goals serve four important purposes

First, they provide unified direction and guidance to everyone in the organization. Goals can help people
understand where the organization is going and why it's important to get there.

Second, the practice of goal setting strongly influences other aspects of planning. Effective goal setting
promotes planning, and good planning facilitates future goal setting.

Third, goals can serve as a source of motivation for the organization's employees.

Finally, objectives provide an effective mechanism for control and evaluation. This means that
performance can be judged in the future based on today's goal accomplishment.

Types of Targets

Goals are set for and at different levels within an organization. An organization's mission is a statement
of "the fundamental purpose of establishing a business that differentiates itself from those of its peers
and defines its scope of activity in terms of its products." and the market".

Types of organizational plans

Organizations establish many different types of plans.

At the general level, they include strategic, tactical and operational plans.

Strategy plan

Strategic plans are developed to achieve strategic goals. More precisely, a strategic plan is a master plan
that outlines decisions about resource allocation, priorities, and the action steps needed to achieve
strategic goals. These plans are laid out by the board of directors and senior leadership, are often
lengthy, and address questions of scope, resource deployment, competitive advantage, and synergy.

Components of strategy
In general, a well-formed strategy addresses three areas: specific competencies, scope, and resource
deployment.

Special competence is something an organization does very well.

The scope of the strategy determines the range of markets in which the organization will compete.

A strategy should also include an outline of the organization's intended resource deployment — how the
organization will distribute its resources across the areas in which it competes.

Most businesses today develop a strategy at two distinct levels: the corporate level and the corporate
level. These degrees offer a rich combination of strategic alternatives for organizations. A business-level
strategy is a set of strategic alternatives that an organization chooses when conducting business in a
particular industry or market. Such alternatives help an organization focus competitive efforts on a
single industry or market in a targeted and focused manner. A corporate-level strategy is the set of
strategic alternatives that an organization chooses when managing its activities simultaneously across
several industries and several markets. Thus, while they develop business-level strategies for each
industry or market, they also develop an overarching strategy that helps identify the combination of
industries and markets that interest the company. Strategy formulation is the set of processes involved
in creating or defining an organization's strategies, while strategy execution is the methods by which
those strategies are operated or implemented. The fundamental difference lies in the boundaries of
content and process: The formulation phase defines what the strategy is, and the implementation phase
focuses on how the strategy will be achieved.

The starting point in strategy formulation is usually a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and
threats) analysis. A SWOT analysis is a careful assessment of an organization's internal strengths and
weaknesses as well as its environmental opportunities and threats. In a SWOT analysis, the best
strategies accomplish the organization's mission by exploiting the organization's opportunities and
strengths while neutralizing threats and avoiding (or correcting) its weaknesses. organization.

Assess the strengths of the organization

An organization's strengths are the skills and competencies that enable it to create and execute its
strategies. Strengths can include things like abundant management resources, excess capital, a unique
reputation and/or brand, and well-established distribution channels.

Indeed, the main purpose of a SWOT analysis is to uncover an organization's unique competencies so
that it can select and implement strategies that exploit its unique organizational strengths. Assessing an
organization's weaknesses are the skills and capabilities that prevent it from choosing and implementing
strategies that support its mission. An organization has essentially two ways to address weaknesses.
First, it may need to invest to acquire the strengths need to execute the strategies that support its
mission. Second, the organization may need to modify its mission so that it can fulfill its mission with the
skills and competencies it already has. In practice, organizations have difficulty focusing on weaknesses,
in part because organizational members are often reluctant to admit that they do not have all the
necessary skills and competencies. Vulnerability assessment also calls into question the judgment of
managers, who chose the mission of the organization in the first place and who did not invest in the
skills and competencies needed to accomplish it. that task.

Assessing the Organization's Opportunities and Threats

While a strength and weakness assessment focuses attention on an organization's internal operations,
an assessment of opportunities and threats requires an analysis of the organization's environment.
Organizational opportunities are areas where higher performance can be generated. Organizational
threats are areas that increase the difficulty of an organization operating at a high level.