Management Planning and Goal Setting

• Planning and organizing are essential management functions
• There are four key management functions: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
• Planning requires starting with a defined goal

Goals

• Goals represent the desired future state an organization aims to achieve.

Plans

• Plans are blueprints that detail how to achieve goals, including allocating resources and setting schedules

Planning Defined

• Planning is the process to develop, organize and evaluate activities to achieve a goal
• Planning is a core management activity that involves selecting a goal with a strategy to achieve that goal
• Planning represents an organization's efforts to maximize future success

Benefits of Planning

• Planning provides motivation and commitment
• It reduces uncertainty for employees by clarifying what needs to be done
• Planning helps managers decide where to allocate resources like employees, money, and equipment
• Planning provides a guide to action that focuses employee efforts on targets and outcomes
• Planning sets performance standards to measure progress

Types of Planning

• There are different types of planning with different goals, timelines, and characteristics
• Operational planning ensures the organization is doing the right things with a short-term focus of 1-5 years
• Business planning determines the feasibility of a specific business program with a short-term focus of 1-5 years
• Resource planning ensures necessary resources to achieve goals and strategies with a midterm focus of 1-10 years
• Organizational planning ensures the organization is structured to meet future challenges and has a midterm focus of 1-10 years
• Contingency planning provides a fallback option if the original strategy fails, 1-20 years is the term
• Emergency planning addresses workplace emergencies on a midterm scale of 1-10 years

Organizational Goals

• Organizational goals provide a foundation for the organization's planning efforts

Mission

• States the organization's reason for existence, values, aspirations, and scope
• Serves as the basis for developing subsequent goals and plans.

Operational Goals

• Specific results expected from departments, work groups, and individuals.
• They occur at the lower levels of the organization to specify action steps
• Department managers use it for daily and weekly operations with quantitative terms
• Operational goals specify plans for supervisors, department managers, and individual employees

Organizational Planning Process

• The organizational planning process consists of several steps:
• Develop the Plan, Translate the Plan, Plan Operations, Execute the Plan, and Monitor and Learn

Effective Goals

• Effective goals are specific, measurable, linked to rewards, and have a defined time period
• Effective goals should be challenging but realistic and cover the key result areas

Shewhart Cycle

• The Shewhart cycle is a quality improvement model, also known as the PDCA cycle
• It consists of four steps: Plan, Do, Check, and Act
• The Plan stage involves identifying the problem, and creating a plan of action
• The Do stage involves executing the plan with everyone's involvement
• The Check stage involves seeing if everything went as planned
• The Act stage involves sharing the learning, standardize the process, REFLECT what can be changed, RESTART the CYCLE

Limitations of planning

• Planning is limited by creating a false sense of certainty because it is based on assumptions
• Planning can cause rigidity in a turbulent environment
• It can get in the way of intuition and creativity

Barriers to Planning

• Barriers to planning include insufficient time/effort, interpersonal issues, and skills
• Also included are a changing environment, poor implementation, monitoring, and lack of support

Organizing

• Organizing involves deploying resources to achieve strategic goals
• Structuring includes division of labor, authority lines, and coordination mechanisms.

Organization Structure

• It includes formal task assignments, reporting relationships, and system designs

Organization chart

• Organization charts visually represent the structure of an organization

Vertical Structure Features

• Include work specialization, chain of command, authority, span of management
• Also includes centralization, decentralization, and formalization.

Staffing

• Staffing includes several HR functions:
• Job description preparation, applicant sourcing, searching, and interviewing
• Also included are applicant selecting, orienting, training and evaluating