Essentials of Planning

Prof. Santanu Mukherjee

Management Functions
 What is Planning?
• Environment for the effective performance of individuals working in
a group
A manager's most essential task is to see that everyone understands the group's
mission and objectives and the methods for attaining them.;
If group effort is to be effective, people must know what they are expected to
accomplish.
It is the most basic of all the managerial functions.
 What is Planning?

• Identifies the goals or

objectives to be achieved;
• Formulates strategies to
achieve them;
• Arranges or creates the
means required, and
• Implements, directs, and
monitors all steps in their
proper sequence.
 Importance of Planning
• A plan is like a map;
• You can always see how much you have progressed towards your
project goal and how far you are from your destination;
• Knowing where you are is essential for making good decisions so
that you know where to go or what to do next;
• For an unstructured activities 80 percent of the effort give less
than 20 percent of the valuable outcome;
• You either spend much time on deciding what to do next, or you
are taking many unnecessary, unfocused, and inefficient steps;
Types of Planning
 Strategic Planning
• Strategic planning is an
organization's process of
defining its strategy, or
direction, and making
decisions on allocating its
resources to pursue this
strategy.
Strategic Planning Cycles
 Tactical Planning
• Tactical planning is the process of outlining business plans for the
coming year;
• This differs from strategic planning as strategic planning encompasses
longer-term goals that reflect the company's direction and its purpose
outlined in its mission statement;
• The tactical planning horizon is shorter than the strategic plan horizon;
• If the strategic plan is for five years, tactical plans might be for a period
of one to three years, or even less, depending on what kind of market
the business serves and the pace of change.
Strategic Vs. Tactical Planning
Operational Planning
 Management by Objectives
• Management
by Objectives (MBO)
A personnel management
technique where managers and
employees work together to set,
record and monitor goals for a
specific period of time;
Organizational goals and
planning flow top-down through
the organization and are
translated into personal goals for
organizational members.
 Key Objectives of MBO
• The core concept of MBO is planning
An organization and its members are not merely reacting to events and problems
but are instead being proactive;
MBO requires that employees set measurable personal goals based upon the
organizational goals;
For example, a goal for a civil engineer may be to complete the infrastructure of a
housing division within the next twelve months;
The personal goal aligns with the organizational goal of completing the
subdivision.
• MBO is a supervised and managed activity so that all of the individual goals can be
coordinated to work towards the overall organizational goal.
 Key Objectives of MBO

• Individual, personal goal can be as one

piece of a puzzle that must fit together
with all of the other pieces to form the
complete puzzle: the organizational
goal;
• Goals are set down in writing annually
and are continually monitored by
managers to check progress;
• Rewards are based upon goal
achievement.
Key Objectives of MBO
End of Pack