Marketing Analysisi

Planning & Strategic Management

In Today’s constantly changing and unstable business environment managers of organisations must understand planning and strategic management and look forward to anticipate change within their organisation to hold a competitive edge or even to survive.

“Planning is a process that involves defining the organisations goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals and developing a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and coordinate organisational work” (Robbins 2003 P200).

Planning is used throughout organisations for improving employee focus, reducing wastage, preparing for and minimising the impact of change and setting standards used for controlling.

Managers use different plans dependant on their breadth, timeframe, specificity and frequency of use.

Strategic plans are those which look at the organisation as a whole then decide on the organisations overall goals and the position and the position in the current and future markets that organisation would like to achieve.

Operational plans are more specific than strategic plans they explain exactly how the overall organisational goals are going to be achieved.

Long term plans are goals to be completed in a period of 3 or more years in contrast short term plans are those to be completed immediately or in a period of less than 1 year.

Specific plans set out exact objectives to be achieved and process to achieve them unlike Directional plans that are a flexible guideline of the direction or purpose aimed to be achieved directional plans are very open to interpretation.

Single use plans are those used only once for a set specific purpose where as standing plans are used on a regular basis for providing support and guidance for ongoing activities.

Although planning is imperative for organisations there are problems with planning in today’s dynamic business environment.

Planning focuses organisations management on the issues and competition of the present environment and not the future ones.

It is hard to develop plans for a dynamic unstable and constantly changing environment because this defeats the very purpose of planning.

Planning makes employees and managers think about the present and or future success of the business which may lead to overconfidence and in turn failure.

Creativity, intuition and visions and risk taking cannot be replaced by planning because they are the key concepts of successful entrepreneurship.

Dynamic environments require flexible planning to be successful and adapt quickly to the changes that occur unexpectedly and the changes that have been researched and predicted in order for an organisation to survive.

An example of a company that uses planning successfully in a dynamic market (property) is McGrath Real Estate Sydney started by John McGrath 15 years ago.

McGrath specialises in Sydney’s prestige property market and has used excellent planning and adaptation to the ever changing property market to turn a company with a single owner manager 15 years ago into one of the most respected and sought after agencies in Sydney with a 2 billion dollar turn over last financial year by researching and identifying consumer needs through planning.

Strategic Management differs from planning “Strategic management is a set of managerial decisions and actions that determine the long run performance of an organisation it entails all of the basic management functions” (Robbins 2003 P222).

Strategic management uses an 8 step process that includes planning , implementing and the evaluation process.

Managers of Organisations use strategic management to observe and analysis there organisation then implement strategy’s to improve on and gain a competitive edge over competitors or exploit a niche market.

The first step in the process is to “identify the organisations current mission, objectives and strategies” (Robbins 2003 P233). This is usually found in the company mission statement one of McGrath real estates missions is “To be the most customer вЂ" centric real estate company worldwide” this is an example of one of the many missions and ojectives of McGrath.

After identifying the current mission goals and strategies the next and second step in the process is to “Analyse the environment”(Robbins 2003 P225)