Planning

 Session-19-22,25

The aim of these sessions was to understand what is managerial planning, its importance and levels as well as the objectives of planning. Planning involves setting objectives and developing appropriate courses of action to achieve these objectives. We discussed the case of Paul Otellini, CEO (past) of Intel; who transformed the operations and minimised the cost for long term growth. He reorganised Intel into 4 divisions and allocated specific roles and responsibilities to each. This helped him to compare performance across various divisions and improve the same. Comparing the results also provided them with a future course of action to overcome the discrepancies. This brings out the essence of planning, how it can lead to the success or failure of an organization. Then we moved on to the importance of planning. Planning is essential as it provides direction to human efforts so the organization can achieve their specific set of goals. It also helps in reducing overlapping and wasteful activities which ensure optimum utilisation of resources. It is due to these reasons planning function is indispensable. Talking about the levels of planning, there is 3 levels - corporate/strategic, business/functional and operational level. Details about the 3 are given in the following chart.

We understood these 3 strategies by taking the example of 3M which is a huge company, producing around 5000 different consumer products. We saw how all the strategies will be planned at different levels and what aspects they will include.