Planning: Concept, Process and Methods

Planning is the process of thinking about activities to achieve the desired organization’s goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals.

Planning and forecasting

Forecasting is the process of predicting how the future will be, while the planning predicts how the future should be. Planning includes forecasting and preparation to react to the future. Planning is one of the most important techniques of project management and time management. 

Importance of Planning

• Plans provide direction
• Reduces uncertainty
• Minimizes waste of time, effort and money
• Establishes goals and assures efficiency

Types of plans

• Strategic plans: long term and directional
• Operational plans: Short term and specific

Goal Setting Methods

• Traditional Goal Setting: Goals are set by the top management and then broken to sub-goals of the departments
• MBO (Management by objectives): a process of setting mutually agreed upon goals by employees and managers and progress is reviewed periodically together.

Planning Process

Recognizing Need for Action: awareness of the opportunities, threats, and SWOT analysis

Setting Objectives: set long term and short term objectives

Developing Premises: premises are the assumptions which are in the form of forecasts, existing plans, past policies, etc.

Identifying Alternatives: identify the multitude of choices

Examining Alternate Course of Action: evaluate and closely examine the pros and cons of each of the alternative plans

Selecting the Alternative: choose the ideal and the most profitable plan with the least amount of negative consequences.

Formulating Supporting Plan: Develop secondary plans to help the implementation of the main plan. The secondary plans which are in fact part of the main plan support the effective implementation of the main plan.

Implementation of the Plan:  implement the plan with the help of required tools such as procedures, policies, budgets, rules, standards, etc.

Psychological aspects of planning

Planning is one of the important function of the brain, which includes the neurological processes of formulation, evaluation, and selection of the sequence of thoughts and actions to attain an objective. Various studies have established that the impaired planning ability is dependant upon damage to the frontal lobe.

• Tower of London (TOL https://www.brainturk.com/tol) developed by Shallice in 1992 and Tower of Hanoi (TOH-R) developed by Édouard Lucas in 1883 are some tests to identify deficits in planning due to the damage to the frontal lobe.