What is planning? What is nature and significance of planning?

what is planning?

Planning is a continuous process and the primary function of management,

According to George Terry, “Planning is the foundation of most successful actions of all enterprises”.

Planning is defined as the activity by which managers analyse present conditions to determine ways of reaching a desired future stage. It embodies the skills of anticipation, influencing, and controlling the nature and direction of change. 

(Dalton McFarland) Planning is the function that determines in advance what should be done. It consists of selecting the enterprise objectives, policies, programmes, procedures, and other means of achieving the objectives.

Nature of Planning 

Pervasiveness of Planning

 Planning is pervasive and extends throughout the organization. Every manager has a planning function to perform in his department. This stems from the fact that he is a manager and that planning is a fundamental function of management. The pervasiveness of planning is commonly overlooked and planning is generally considered as being the function of toplevel managers of the organization. 

Open System Approach 

Planning adopts an open system approach. It takes inputs from the environment, processes these, and exports outputs to the environment. The open system approach of planning indicates that the identification of gaps is influenced by a variety of environmental factors like economic, political, legal, technological, socio-cultural, and competitive. These factors are dynamic and change with time. Therefore, while adopting an open system approach in planning, managers have to take into account the dynamic features of the business environment. 

A Rational Approach 

Planning is a rational approach for defining where one stands, where one wants to go in the future, and how to reach there. In an organizational context, planning as a rational approach tries to fill the gap between actual status (current performance) and desired status (desired performance). 

Significance of planning

(i) Planning is a primary function of management:

 When planning, the manager decides which of the alternatives should be followed, which policies, procedures, programmes, projects and so on would be set up. 

(ii) Planning is goal oriented: 

Planning is aimed at defining the organisational goals and design appropriate action plans in order to achieve these goals.

(iii) Planning is an intellectual process : 

In the words of Theo Haimann, “Planning requires a mental predisposition to think before acting, to act in the light of facts rather than of guesses, and generally speaking to do things in an orderly way”. 

(iv) Planning is pervasive: 

Planning is all pervasive and it embraces all segments and levels in the organisation. 

(v) Planning is continuous function: 

To keep the organization as a going concern, it is essential that planning must be done continuously. 

(vi) Planning involves choice between alternatives: 

Planning involves choice among alternatives courses of action. If there is only one course, objective, policy, programme or procedure, perhaps then there exists no need for planning