Organizational Plans

• Strategic plans (institutional) define the organization’s long-term vision, articulate the organization’s mission and value statements, define what business the organization is in or hopes to be in, and articulate how the organization will integrate itself into its general and task environments.
• Administrative plans specify the allocation of organizational resources to internal units of the organization, address the integration of the institutional level of the organization with the technical core, and address the integration of the diverse units of the organization.
• Operating plans (technical core) cover the day-to-day operations of the organization.
• Policies are general statements of understanding or intent that guide decision-making, permitting the exercise of some discretion, and guide behavior.
• Rules are guides to action that do not permit discretion in interpretation, specifying what is permissible and what is not permissible.
• Procedures are like rules, guiding action, specifying a series of steps that must be taken in the performance of a particular task.
• Single-Use Plans

  • Programs—a complex set of policies, rules, and procedures necessary to carry out a course of action.
  • Projects—specific action plans often created to complete various aspects of a program.
  • Budgets—plans expressed in numerical terms.
• Time-Frame Plans

  • Short-, medium-, and long-range plans—differ in the distance into the future projected:
  • Short-range—several hours to a year
  • Medium-range—one to five years
  • Long-range—more than five years
• Organizational Scope Plans

  • Business/divisional-level plans—focus on one of the organization’s businesses (or divisions) and its competitive position.
  • Unit/functional-level plans—focus on the day-to-day operations of lower-level organization units; marketing, human resources, accounting, and operations plans (production).
  • Tactical plans—division-level or unit-level plans designed to help an organization accomplish its strategic plans.
• Contingency Plans

  • Plans created to deal with events that might come to confront the organization (e.g., natural disasters, terrorist threats); alternative courses of action that are to be implemented if events disrupt a planned course of action.
• Strategic plans


   address the organization’s institutional-level needs. Strategic plans outline a long-term vision for the organization. They specify the organization’s reason for being, its strategic objectives, and its operational strategies—the action statements that specify how the organization’s strategic goals are to be achieved.
• Operating plans


   provide direction and action statements for activities in the organization’s technical core.
• Administrative plans


   work to integrate institutional-level plans with the operating plans and tie together all of the plans created for the organization’s technical core.