Organizational implications for long range planning

Much long range planning has ignored the need to change the firm's organization as its environment changes. Research demonstrates that those organizations which are effective have structures and behaviour which are congruent with their environments. To ensure that organizations can cope and adapt to future changes in environmental conditions long range planners need to take into consideration the appropriate development of both the organization and its members. This needs a multi-disciplinary approach in which behavioural scientists can play an important role. The Chemical Allied Products Industry Training Board has been developing a technology for examining organizations which could assist long range planners and managers to develop the organization and its members to suit the needs of future environmental change. This article discusses the many implications of these points.     

Strategies for planning

In recent years there has been a good deal of discussion amongst planning specialists and academics about the gap which exists between the theory of planning as set out in journals and textbooks, and the practice of planning in private and public organizations. Planners are continually complaining about the resistance to planning by top management and operating managers in divisions and departments.In this article the author aims to produce a reconciliation between theory and practice and to discuss what alternative strategies are open to planners in devising planning systems for their organizations.He suggests that the problem has its origin in the fact that corporate planning theory was first developed by management scientists as a total systems approach. Corporate planners have failed to sell an integrated planning system either as programme budgeting or as corporate planning. Research suggests that a management team can only adopt and implement a comprehensive planning system in very special circumstances, e.g. when the organization's survival is threatened, a new management team has been appointed and the staff of the organization are ready to accept radical change.In normal circumstances the planner is wrong to advocate a ‘root and branch’ solution. He must diagnose the planning needs of the organization and his objective must be not merely to establish a particular planning procedure but rather to discover how he can best improve the quality of management decisions.Recent studies on strategy formation indicate that the introduction of a formal planning procedure is only a partial answer to the problem of improving the quality of management decisions.The paper reviews various approaches to planning and considers how they relate to organizations with different strategic problems, with differing organization structures and various management styles.     

STRATEGIC FACILITY PLANNING: THE ANALYSIS OF OPTIONS

This paper addresses the issue of uncertainty in planning the long-term development of facility systems. In certain instances, the high variance of a single future forecast can be reduced by using a set of alternative future scenarios. By carefully selecting facility configurations, the planner can delay the selection of a future set of facility sites at little or no sacrifice while additional information is gathered and uncertainty reduced. This allows the planner to maintain flexibility in adapting to a complex and dynamic environment. Several models are presented for different planning contexts. Examples for each, as well as a robust bicriterion solution heuristic, are also provided.     

Segmentation Opportunities for a Social Planner: Impact of Limited Resources

In this research note, we investigate segmentation opportunities for social planners such as government agencies, nonprofits, and public organizations. These opportunities arise when the potential products are vertically (quality) differentiated and the consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences toward quality. In these cases, whether to offer quality differentiated products and what quality level to choose are important decisions for a social planner. In this research note, we identify the conditions where it is socially optimal to offer either one homogenous or two quality differentiated products. We find that the resource limitations may result in a single product offering and that the quality of the product depends on the maximum surplus per unit resource consumed by the products. We also compare our findings to a profit‐maximizing firm. We find that the resource limitations may cause a profit‐maximizing firm to provide a better service to some consumers than the social planner. Contrary to common wisdom, we also show that the capacity limitations may force the social planner to act like a profit‐maximizing firm in terms of its pricing and product mix choice.     

Strategic planning in European multinationals

Recent environmental changes have brought about modifications in the strategic planning practices of multinational businesses. These modifications in the strategic planning practices were studied through the medium of in-depth interviews with planners in a number of concerns. Of the several changes observed, predominant are the shortening of time horizons and the increase in flexibility. Equally noteworthy is the surprising lack of change in the social concern of a number of the organizations. This article summarizes a study of the effects of environmental changes on multinational-business planning.     

The TOWS matrix—A tool for situational analysis

This article has two main purposes. One is to review general considerations in strategic planning and the second to introduce the TOWS Matrix for matching the environmental threats and opportunities with the company's weaknesses and especially its strengths. These factors per se are not new; what is new is systematically identifying relationships between these factors and basing strategies on them. There is little doubt that strategic planning will gain greater prominence in the future. Any organization—whether military, product-oriented, service-oriented or even governmental—to remain effective, must use a rational approach toward anticipating, responding to and even altering the future environment.     

Financial planning using goal programming

Financial planners within industrial organizations are often given the impossible task of formulating a multi-year financial plan which is severely over-constrained. As the planner attempts to meet one objective another variable (or ratio of variables) becomes unacceptable and he is faced with the familiar ‘balloon squeezing’ effect. The problem is one of multiple conflicting objectives (goals) hence lends itself very well to a goal programming method of solution. This approach provides a powerful ‘what-if’ device for the financial planner and allows him to arrive at a satisfactory solution by examining the various trade-offs among the conflicting goals. To be an effective and usable tool, the individual goals are not assigned a priority coefficient as is typical of most goal programming applications. Rather, the planner can reflect his priorities in the manner in which he performs the subsequent what-if analyses. Also, a more flexible penalty function is introduced allowing the planner to assign a more realistic set of penalities which vary in severity over a specified range. Methods of implementing this concept are discussed which overcome the problems created by the immense storage requirements and the necessity of assigning the various penalties.     

Understanding the planner’s role in lookahead construction planning

Capacity planning is instrumental in production planning as the variability witnessed in construction projects complicates the planner’s role in achieving a balance between weekly task load and available resources. The purpose of this article is to assess the effects of capacity planning on a project’s time and cost performance and to inform planners on the pitfalls of uninformed capacity planning. A simulation model is developed to test several project scenarios against different capacity planning methods. Cost, time and planning quality measures are developed to track project’s performance throughout the construction period. Results show that the planner’s choice of capacity planning method and the type of project both affect a project’s cost and duration. Interestingly, informed planners who are aware of a project’s characteristics are able to achieve the best balance between weekly load and capacity. They are able to reduce incurred costs wasted on idle resources without significantly affecting the construction period.     

The value of rescheduling functionality within standard MRP packages

One of the basic functions of an MRP system is to issue rescheduling messages that urge the planner tospeed up or slow down open orders. It seems in practice that these messages are not used at all by planners. This is mostly due to the inaccuracy of MRP, that more or less ignores safety time, safety stocks and lotsize flexibility in the calculation of reschedule-in messages. Reschedule-out messages are usually ignored because planners do not see the value of the message. Other reasons for not adhering to rescheduling messages are a lack of maintenance of MRP parameters or simply the wrong use of the MRP function. In the future, MRP rescheduling functionality will be used even less than today, due to the changing role of MRP within the planning framework. With the uprise of finite capacity scheduling packages, MRP is being pushed one level upward in the planning hierarchy. This means that rescheduling functionalities for the short term will become completely obsolete in MRP systems.     

What kind of corporate planner do you need?

The planning literature ignores distinctions among types of plans and types of planners. Consequently, a systematic pairing of planners and a company's level of planning need is not well understood or implemented in practice. This paper provides two missing links in order to bridge this shortfall between theory and practice. One is a planning matrix which establishes six possible planning modes for a company based on its stage of development and management style. The second is a distinction between three types of planners who would be appropriate to each planning mode. The matrix plus the three categories of planners provides a new tool for management in its responsibility for planning the job of the corporate planner. In doing so, it also surfaces some underlying causes of organizational strain and stress associated with the corporate planner's position.     

Long range planning— An open systems view

Long range planning has been identified as a major managerial factor for many years. Unfortunately, some important factors have not been adequately incorporated into the planning process. These componets of open systems theory—the environment, goals, and strategy— are discussed and integrated into the long-range planning process. This procedure will make for a more successful and effective planning operation in organizations     

Strategic planning—Which style do you need?

Strategic planning is now a large and diverse activity practised in many different kinds of organizations. This article provides an overview of the field with a summary of the five main schools of thought each with its own business philosophy and a range of practical approaches and techniques. These basic styles are concerned with planning as a central control system, a framework for innovation, an organizational change process, a political activity, and a way of exploring the future. Most planning systems have a dominant style or focus and this emphasis needs to be adjusted in response to changes which are occurring continually in the organization and in the external environment. The article is designed to help the senior manager or corporate planner to assess the state of planning in his organization and to see where there are important gaps in the enterprise's capability for planning which might be filled by the launching of new initiatives. The article also offers an agenda of approaches for consideration by the executive who wishes to move his enterprise from a conventional 5-year planning and budgeting system towards a more comprehensive process of managing organizational change and development.     

Planning corporate growth with inverted product life cycles

The boomtime periods of growth enjoyed by U.S. corporations during the 1950s and 1960s are not likely to return. Firms desiring to realize consistent and continuous sales volume growth in the years ahead will need new perspectives and tools to actively and systematically plan that growth.Traditional approaches to planning growth are too unsophisticated for today's complex and competitive marketplace. Computerized simulations and other advanced techniques available today are, on the other hand, a step too far into the future for most business planners.This article presents a new framework and new perspectives for viewing and considering alternative growth opportunities. The framework—the “Inverted Product Life Cycle”—takes something with which most managers are very familiar (the product life cycle concept) and expands it into an analytical yet intuitive and useful tool for planning future growth.     

Exploring Strategic Positioning in the UK Charitable Sector: Emerging Evidence from Charitable Organizations that Provide Public Services

The UK voluntary sector operates in an arguably enabling policy context. Yet, other external environmental influences have posed major challenges for charitable organizations within the wider voluntary sector. This paper aims to rectify the current lack of empirical research on how charitable organizations have responded in terms of their strategic positioning to the changing external operating environment and policy context. It both explores the positioning strategies adopted by two contrasting British charities that deliver public services in different ways, and investigates the factors that have influenced their choice of positioning strategies. The cases studied extend our knowledge of strategic positioning in organizations other than commercial (for-profit) ones. The findings provide new evidence that charities have begun to strategically position themselves in response to both internal organizational factors and external environmental influences. Emerging lessons from the experiences of the case study organizations provide guidance to charity managers in planning and implementing strategic positioning in their organizations. The findings also underscore the need to develop theoretical and conceptual management models specific to non-profit organizations, such as charities.     

Planning in a state of turbulence

This paper is concerned with an exploration of the role of the long range planner, whether in the private or public sector of the economy, and the impact made upon the processes of his work by government's increasing propensity to manipulate the economy. The authors' researches over the last 2 years into the comparative nature of planning processes in the U.K. economy have made it abundantly clear to them that planners are increasingly concerned at the dangerous potential of such impact upon their forecasting procedures. The emphasis here will rest upon the planner in private enterprises, although the authors' work in both local government and the nationalized enterprises suggest that the problem is of equal importance in these sectors.The authors consider first the past nature of the search processes in long range planning and the context of such attempts to narrow down the range of variables that form the enterprise's perception of its future. Secondly, they examine the emerging discontinuity and the changing role of government, with particular reference to indicative planning concepts. Then they introduce some of the findings of a recent survey of attitudes towards long range planning in the construction industry of the U.K., a sector vitally influenced by turbulence in the economy and with particular interest in government's ideas of macro-planning. Finally Edwards and Harris examine the implications to government and to planners of their findings.     

Critical Dimensions of Strategic Information Systems Planning

Strategic information systems planning (SISP) is the process whereby an organization establishes a long-range plan of computer-based applications in order to achieve its goals. A number of problems can potentially impede information systems planners as they carry out the process. A survey of 80 firms who completed the SISP process revealed that the problems constitute five factors: the organization, implementation, database, hardware, and cost. A discriminant analysis showed that three factors—the organization, implementation, and database—best distinguished satisfied from dissatisfied information systems planners. A research application of the five factors suggested that organizations with more sophisticated business planning endure significantly less severe hardware and implementation problems.     

Water rights,conservation and recreation planning

Decision making for administrative planning is a particularly important factor. Additionally, water resource management is a major problem for public agencies. Therefore, a case study was developed on the Illinois water rights laws, their implications for planning, and the need to use a total system approach to water resource planning to prevent a massive chaotic situation. Many of the problems created in Illinois because of the lack of a coordinated approach to water rights laws and planning were identified, and suggestions were made to alleviate the situation. While the article relates to a specific environment and a particular set of laws, it raises questions which will be pertinent to water resource planners in many other locations.     

What lies ahead for medical management?

The consensus is that, in spite of a reluctance in Washington to undertake any drastic reform of the health care financing and delivery system, the changes that are already in place in individual organizations and that are in place or being contemplated at the state level are certain to make the health care system of tomorrow very different from that of today. Physician executives can play an important role in the transition that will be required, but they will have to use a flexible, especially nondogmatic approach if they wish to cope successfully in this increasingly whirling environment. For such physicians, the author says, the opportunities, though unknown, are enormous.     

What Should Planners Do to Address Unethical Political Pressure?

This paper presents the case study of three planners who risked their jobs to oppose unethical political pressures in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. It attempts to understand what was done by these planners to address those pressures and what lessons could we learn from their experiences. This research found that in a hostile political environment where unethical political pressure is strong, and voicing is of little help, unique actions of procedural planning (exit, deny-exit-and-expose, and defend), deontological in nature, may have to be adopted. If that is not adequate one should also consider de-communicating or manipulative actions, teleological in approach.     

Tools and techniques of long-range planners

Long-range planning is concerned with the integration of predictions with corporate strategies. Both practitioners and scholars of management have frequently proposed approaches to planning that they believe to be helpful. The purpose of this paper is to report which techniques and tools and what approaches to planning are actually being used. It is hoped that this information will provide the executive or practitioner with a framework for evaluating his planning practices relative to other planners.This paper is divided into four parts. Part l provides information concerning the survey and data on which this article is based. Part ll deals with the planning process in approximately 400 business firms. Part lll examines the use of two planning tools—outside consultants and computers/mathematical models. The last section presents a summary and some general conclusions drawn from the analysis.