Welcome to PlanningSkills.COM

This website focuses on a wide variety of topics related to organization and individual planning situations. The primary focus is business planning.

Planning is an anticipatory decision making process that involves situation analysis, forecasting outcomes and events, evaluating alternative courses of action, anticipating consequences and considering implementation issues and contingencies. Planning often begins with asking one or more questions, for example: What if ...? Could we ...? Do we ...? Is it possible...? How should we respond ...? How can we ...? Is it feasible to ...?

In general, planning is a proactive process that is intended to help individuals, groups and organizations achieve performance objectives.

Featured Glossary Term

The following is adapted from George Steiner, Top Management Planning, 1969.

• Strategic planning is conducted at a higher level of an organization than tactical planning.
• Strategic planning is both continuous and irregular in response to non-routine stimuli.
• Strategic planning is heavily dependent upon subjective assessments.
• Strategic planning usually involves choice among a range of alternatives.
• Uncertainty is high in strategic planning.
• The problems confronted by strategic planning are unstructured and usually unique.
• Strategic planning requires large amounts of information.
• Strategic planning usually covers a long time period.
• Strategic planning tends to encompass the entire scope of activity of an organization.
• Strategic planning constitutes the point of reference or framework for other planning, especially tactical planning.
• Strategic planning tends to be broad in scope.
• Strategic planning tends to involve only the senior managers of an organization.
• The effectiveness and efficiency of a strategy is hard to evaluate.
• Risks, controversy and innovation are usually involved in development of a strategy.
• Strategic planning is usually conducted from the perspective of the organization as a whole.

Featured Planning Tip

In the late 1970s, the Chinese communist reformers rallied around a slogan "shí shì qiú shì" meaning "Seek truth from facts". It is a Chinese expression that dates from the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 25 AD). This was the credo of the reformers who moved China to a more market driven economy following Mao's death. It meant that facts rather than ideology should be the criterion of the 'correctness' of a policy; the policy had to work in practice. Deng Xiaoping is quoted as saying, 'It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse.' Mouse-catching (expertise) is important. Pragmatism is often the best philosophical guide for successful planning, "Will it work?"

"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is." - Winston Churchill

"The truth depends on, or is only arrived at by, a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material." -- Coleridge