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

Organizations experience unexpected events that disrupt operations and plans. Significant contingencies should be anticipated and plans should be developed for responding when a specific contingency or a category of contingencies occurs. The process of developing contingency plans is called contingency planning.

Contingency plans should be developed by a team representing diverse areas of the organization.

1) The first step in contingency planning is preparing a "comprehensive list of the potentially serious incidents that could affect the normal operations of the business" or organization.

2) A contingency plan should then be developed that includes actions "to move the organization from its disrupted status towards a return to normal operations" or to a new level of improved operations.

The plan should be a dynamic document that is updated regularly to insure it remains current and relevant.

Featured Planning Tip

"Fog of war" is the name given to the lack of knowledge that occurs during a war. Most importantly it refers to each side's uncertainty about the enemy's capabilities and plans, but it also includes the chaos that can occur in one's own forces, for instance when a unit misinterprets its orders, or takes a wrong turn and becomes lost.

The Prussian military analyst Karl von Clausewitz wrote: "The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not unfrequently like the effect of a fog or moonshine gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance."

Gesamtbegriff einer allgemeinen Friktion