Planning.
What is understood as Planning?
Planning is the process through which you obtain a vision of the future, where it is possible to determine and achieve the objectives through the election of a course of action.
What is the importance of Planning?
· It favors enterprise development.
· It reduces risks to a minimum.
· It maximizes the use of resources and time.
José Antonio Fernández Arena - author - states that "Planning is a duty of the administrator. However, the extent and character of planning vary with his authority and with the nature of policies and plans designed by his superior".
The acknowledgement of the influence of planning greatly helps clarify the attempts of some administration scholars to distinguish between formulating the policy (set thinking guidelines for decision making) and administration, or between the director and the administrator or the supervisor.
An administrator, because of his delegation of authority or position in the organization, can improve the established plan or make it basic and applicable in a greater proportion to the enterprise than the planning of other. However, every administrator - from directors to supervisors - plan what corresponds to them.
How is Planning classified?
There are several types of plans. Among those, we have:
· Mission: it is the reason of existing for the enterprise. It is also known as the labor, the charge or special service an enterprise sets upon itself to be achieved in a long term. For example, the mission of a university is a higher molding of individuals, teaching and investigating.
· Vision: it is the administrative capability of placing the enterprise in the future, or where we want to be in five-years-time. For example, a Bank may have as vision "to be the leading enterprise in the rendering of financial services throughout Europe".
· Objectives: They are the result we hope to get. It is where the joined efforts are focused on. For example, the objective of a commercial enterprise may be increasing sales in 2004 compared to those in 2003. Objectives may be short term (1 year term), medium term (from 1 to 3 years), and long term (over 3 years).
· Goals: They are the different purposes that must be fulfilled to reach the objective. Goals are more specific ends that integrate the objective of the enterprise. For example, a commercial enterprise that wishes to increase its sales; a goal could be training its sales team during the first two months of 2004 through which it hopes to reach the stated objective.
· Policies: These are guidelines or lines of general character that indicate the frame inside which the employees of an enterprise can make decisions, using their initiative and good judgment. For example, competing based in market prices.
· Rules: They are precise norms that regulate a particular situation. Here, specific actions and omissions are expressed, and they give no freedom of action. Examples of this type are "no smoking", "no food allowed", etc.
·Strategies : The action of projecting to an awaited future and the mechanisms to obtain it. Moreover, it is to make the future of the organization to behave as it was determined. I t can then be said that strategies are courses of action, prepared to face the changing situations of the internal and external environments in order to achieve its objectives. For example, a strategy could "conduct marketing investigations permanently, and provide efficient information to the sales team in order to increase sales".
· Programs: These are plans that hold objectives, policies, strategies, procedures, rules, duty and resource assignment, and the necessary actions to achieve objectives, establishing the necessary time for the execution of each and every one of the operation stages.
· Budgets: It is a plan which represents the expectations for a future period, expressed in quantity terms, such as money, working hours, produced units, etc. Budgets may be from Operation (sales, production, inventory, etc) and Financial (cash, capital, financial states, etc.).
· Procedures: they are plans that point out subsequent tasks that must be carried out in a chronological sequence to achieve the previously established objectives. An example of such plan is the procedure carried out for the payment of salaries to employees.
