Planning & Decision making

• planning - involves defining the organization’s goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and coordinate organizational work
• planning - It is concerned with both ends (what is to be done) and means (how it is to be done).
• Importance of planning - Give the organization legitimacy to its stakeholders
• importance of planning - Serve to motivate and increase commitment among employees
• • importance of planning - Serve as roadmaps or guides to action – towards a targeted outcome
  • Serve as basis for decision-making and reduces uncertainty of decisions
  • Provide a set standard of performance or performance criteria
• planning - The primary management function because it

  establishes the basis for all the other functions that managers perform
• two elements of planning: goals & plans
• goals - desired future state that the organization attempts to realize
• plans - A blueprint for goal achievement and specifies the necessary resource allocations, schedules, tasks, and other actions
• well defined goals are: SMART & FAST
• • SMART GOALS
  • SPECIFIC
  • MEASURABLE
  • ATTAINABLE
  • RELEVANT
  • TIME-BOUND
• Specific - direct, detailed, and meaningful
• Measurable - quantifiable to track progress/success
• Attainable - realistic, with resources to attain it
• Relevant - aligns with your company mission
• Time-bound - has a deadline
• • FAST GOALS
  • Frequently discussed
  • Ambitious
  • Specific
  • Transparent
• Frequently discussed - should be constantly discussed, reviewed, and monitored for progress
• Ambitious - should push employee’s performance and

  their absolute limit
• Specific - specifies needs to be achieved, should be tangible, trackable, and measurable
• Transparent - individual goals are connected to team goals, hence to organizational goals
• Approaches to Goal Setting: Traditional goal-setting & management by objectives
• AFI framework: Analyze, Formulate, Implement
• Traditional Goal Setting - Goals set by top managers flow down through the organization, broken down into subgoals for each

  organizational level
• downside of traditional goal setting - as goals make their way down from the top of the organization to the lower, they lose clarity and unity; potentially expensive for large, global corporations.
• traditional goal setting

  
• management by objectives - Specific performance goals are jointly determined by employees and their managers, where employees are more self-directed than boss-directed. Progress is periodically reviewed, and rewards are allocated based on this progress
• 4 elements of management by objectives: goal specificity, participative decision making, an explicit time period, and performance feedback
• types of plans:

  • breadth
  • time frame
  • specificity
  • frequency of use
• breadth - strategic vs operational
• Time Frame – short term vs. long term
• Specificity – directional vs. specific
• Frequency of Use – single use vs. standing
• strategic --> long term --> directional --> single use
• operational --> short term --> specific --> standing
• strategic plans - Broad; apply to the whole organization and

  establish organizational goals
• operational plans - Narrow; encompass a particular operational area of the organization
• long term - With a time frame beyond three years
• short term - With a time frame of one year or less
• anything in between long and short term would be an intermediate plan