Lecture 6 Planning

Three Levels : Corporate Level , Business Unit Level , Functional Level
Strategic plan, Tactical plan operational plan

External Issues: employee productivity , local autonomy , local/geographical strategy , Local marketing , employee skills , competitors


Internal issues:

Internal analysis tools : SWOT , TOWS , BCG Matrix

Threshold Competencies and Core Competencies to achieve competitive advantage

CSF and KSS critical and key success factors

Outsourcing services eg DELL

Transparent ceiling - Wallmart v Kmart
All the information about organisation is available to the top level management all the time . This leads to more efficient decision making but can leave the middle level manager with not much to do.

Lego obsessed with designing more complex products
That story made me laugh - It is so true that companies go and develop products without regard to what the customers want. Again I have seen many development teams and product owners go off and add functionality that customers do not want while leaving out critical functionality. One wonders if they ever left their "Ivory Tower" to see what is happening on the outside and how their products are being used.

Last three phases of the Planning process

Design - Or develop action plan - Goals,tasks,objectives,outcomes
Implementation - How do we go about doing the task
Evaluation - Monitor , control , remediate(fix), check

I found a good wiki on strategic management