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

In many situations, choosing a specific alternative means that other alternatives can not be chosen. These foregone alternatives are opportunities lost. Opportunity cost is the benefit foregone (given up) by choosing one opportunity rather than another with a higher short run payoff.

For example, attending college includes direct and opportunity costs. Assume tuition is $30,000 for one year and that you are foregoing a $40,000 salary that you could have been earning. The opportunity cost is $40,000 and so the real cost of attending college is $70,000.

Assessing opportunity costs is necessary to evaluate the true cost of a course of action.

Featured Planning Tip

Someone must initiate and manage the planning process. It may be led by the CEO or by a staff person. Planning initiated, led and conducted by line managers is generally the best. "Don’t let your planning process push you around. Take charge and harness it’s power to achieve your goals. It’s a jungle out there and the competition is sure to know where they are going. Don’t let them beat you to your destination."