Planning and SMART Goals Overview

SMART Goals

• SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
• Clear criteria for success and evaluation
• Important in planning to achieve specific outcomes
• Promotes clarity and focus
• Example: "Increase sales by 15% in the next quarter."

Benefits of Planning

• Enhanced efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity.
• Reduced risks and uncertainties with a better view of the future
• Improved resource allocation and utilization
• Facilitates better decision-making
• Provides a clear direction for employees and teams.
• Promotes better communication and coordination
• Strong sense of purpose and commitment

Steps in the Planning Process

• Define the goals and objectives.
• Analyze the situation and identify opportunities and challenges.
• Develop alternative plans.
• Select the best plan considering available resources and constraints.
• Implement the chosen plan and monitor the progress.
• Evaluate the outcomes, make adjustments, and repeat the process.

Competitive Advantage

• A feature that distinguishes a company from its competitors.
• It can be based on lower costs, unique product features or services, strong brand reputation, superior customer service, innovative products, or superior distribution channels.
• Ability to deliver more value relative to competitors.

Strategic Management

• The process of analyzing, developing, and implementing strategies for achieving organizational goals.
• Involves setting objectives, allocating resources, and monitoring performance.
• The continuous process of making decisions and aligning organizational actions with desired objectives

Strategy Formulation & Strategy Implementation

• Strategy Formulation: Developing strategies to achieve the organizational objectives.
• Creating a detailed plan of action to attain the goals
• Strategy Implementation: putting the formulated strategies into action.
• Ensuring that those strategies are carried out effectively.
• Necessary for translating plans into results.
• Encompasses resource allocation, skill development, and organizational changes.

Mission vs. Vision Statement

• Mission Statement: Describes the organization's current purpose, what it does, and who it serves. - A roadmap for the current business activities of an organization
• Vision Statement: Provides a long-term aspiration for the organization and its desired future state.
  • Outlines the future of the organization that the members believe in.

Control and Types of Control

• Control: The process of monitoring and evaluating performance to ensure that organizational goals are being met.
• Types of control:
  • Feedforward Control: Anticipating problems before they occur, such as preventative measures(quality checks)
  • Concurrent Control: Occurs alongside the performance of an activity and ensures standards are maintained. Monitoring a process to ensure that it is not deviating from specified criteria.
  • Feedback Control: Monitoring the results of the process to identify areas of correction for future improvement. Evaluate after an activity has occurred to see if any adjustments are required for the future.

Market Share and Market Growth Calculation

• Market Share: Percentage of total market sales held by a business.

  • Calculated by dividing business sales by total market sales during a specific timeframe, expressed in percentage.

• Market Growth: Indicates how much a market or industry is increasing over a particular period.

• Calculated by finding the percentage change in market size during a period of time.

Steps in the Control Process

• Establish standards: Determining desired levels of performance
• Measure performance: Collecting data to quantify performance metrics.
• Compare performance to standards: Analyzing actual performance against pre-set targets
• Analyze deviations: Identifying the causes of any significant differences and evaluating if the variances are acceptable.
• Take corrective action: Implementing adjustments in processes or strategies when standards are not met, in the system, or processes.

Discipline and Progressive Discipline

• Discipline: The practice of enforcing rules.
• Progressive Discipline: A step-by-step approach for addressing employee misconduct.
  • Warnings and escalating consequences to address and correct the behavior to eventually improve performance.
• Starts with warnings and progressively increases in severity to correct any substandard behaviour.

Strategic Management Tools

• SWOT Analysis: Evaluates an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
  • Internal factors: Strengths, Weaknesses | External factors: Opportunities, Threats
• BCG Matrix: A portfolio analysis tool used by businesses to categorize their products and divisions based on market share and market growth, to allocate resources.
  • Helps in decision-making, prioritizing investments based on growth potential and market share of different business units.
• Porter’s Five Forces: Analyzes the competitive intensity and attractiveness of an industry.
  • Examines factors like threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, and buyers, threat of substitutes, and competitive rivalry.
• PEST Analysis: Evaluates the external macro-environmental factors impacting an organization (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological).
  • Helps in understanding potential opportunities and threats, formulating effective strategies.
• Gantt Chart: A project management tool for visualizing timelines and dependencies between different tasks in a project.
  • Shows the start and finish dates for each task, and the dependencies between those tasks.