Mgr

Management Planning Paper

MANAGEMENT: THEORY,PRACTICE, APPLICATION MGT/330

By Brian H.

November 6, 2007

Planning is central to a company's longevity and success, and can be equated to the lifeblood of its survival in the ever changing marketplace. Planning, more importantly, strategic planning occurs at all levels of a company to ensure its growth, performance, and economic sustainability. A quote published by the Journal for Quality & Participation, Strategy Development and Deployment, clearly articulates the importance of planning:

Selecting a planning process that helps your organization identify the key issues that are affecting its performance can ensure that you're prepared to deal with the future -- no matter what it ultimately becomes.

Companies employ strategic planning to be able to respond to ever changing market conditions and demands. Strategic change keeps companies competitive and in business. To highlight this, I will use an example of my work.

I was brought on to help build a new global practice called Interactive Data to respond to the market demand of a revolutionary global information standard. It is a structured way that information can be harnessed to make business decisions. This Interactive Data practice was not apart of my Firm's broader strategic plan but they realized they needed to rethink its market approach to realign it to the current marketplace. The introduction of this new practice overlapped with current initiatives already apart of the Firm.

Planning had to be undertaken to not only coordinate with other stakeholders in the Firm strategy but to collaborate on aligning the separate but equally invested Firm initiatives. For example, the Information Management practice is a relatively mature practice that provides guidance for large corporations to maximize the efficiency of it data and informational assets, and furthermore, how to leverage that data in business intelligence applications to enable clients realize the greatest benefits of its information for decision making. Interactive Data is a component of Information Management, however, also has broader implications to cross industry service industrializations and client information infrastructure modernization.

Significant planning and coordination had to take place to ensure the overall corporate vision was realigned to my new service offering and that related methodologies, services, practices, and people could be accounted for. This was extremely challenging because it required behavioral change, and change to methodologies (planning) and practice (planning) people felt ownership of, clearly impacting the planning achieved by others.

The importance