Planning

Of all of the manager’s functions, the one that has probably gotten the most ink in recent years is the Planning function. This is not to say that it is the best understood, however. A quick search on Amazon, for example, yields 432,112 different entries, including such similar sounding (but completely irrelevant) topics as Event Planning, Estate Planning and Financial Planning. Even restricting your search to business topics will bring up tens of thousands of books about planning at different levels, not to mention journal articles, lectures, tape series, videos, and (ahem!) blogs.

Like many other disciplines, the details and minutiae of Planning can take years to master, but the basic concept isn’t actually all that complicated. When you look at a large task, like building a new brand of automobile, eradicating world hunger, or even getting all of this week’s work finished, there’s obviously a lot of things going on. The trick is to break each one of them down into smaller and smaller pieces, until you reach a level where there is a concrete action you (or one of your personnel) can take to complete that task. This type of planning is often called “Planning By Objectives” or PBO, since what you are doing is, in effect, breaking your overall mission down into subsets or Goals, and then defining the Objectives that must be met to complete each goal.

Once you have the individual action items worked out, it is helpful to arrange them according to the order in which they need to be completed. For this, the Gantt chart can be extremely useful. Keep in mind, of course, that this becomes exponentially more complicated as the scope of your overall mission grows. A complete Operational plan for a five-member work group might take you only a few minutes each week; the plan to start a new car company would take months to complete, and a (workable) plan to eradicate world hunger has so far eluded even very large organizations formed to do just that…

In general, a Strategic Plan is one that covers the complete scope of the organization, starting with the Mission of the agency, and working down to actual tasks and action items. An Operational Plan deals with a specific unit’s operation, and is most often limited to the immediate period under review (e.g. a monthly, quarterly or annual plan). One could think of the organization’s Strategic Plan as being the sum of all of the Operational Plans completed for the duration of time during which it exists. A Daily Plan may or may not be necessary, depending on how many subordinates you are responsible for, and how many tasks are to be accomplished in that given day. When employed, it can be considered an Operational-level plan with a duration of only one day.

Of course, once you’ve planned out what you need to accomplish during a given period, the next step is to determine what resources you will need and who will be tasked with which action items. That step is collectively known as Organizing, and it will be my next topic…