What Is Your Planning Style?
individually write a plan for the current year. how would you describe your planning? Which type of planner are you? Write a brief essay that describes your planning style. Use specific examples and then share your insights in a group.
Forecasting
A mistake common to novice managers is a failure to complete adequate proactive planning.
Instead, many managers operate in a crisis mode and fail to use available historical patterns to assist them in planning. Nor do they examine present clues and projected statistics to determine future needs. In other words, they fail to forecast. Forecasting involves trying to estimate how a condition will be in the future. Forecasting takes advantage of input from others, gives sequence in activity, and protects an organization against undesirable changes.
With changes in technology, payment structures, and resource availability, the manager who is unwilling or unable to forecast accurately impedes the organization’s efficiency and the unit’s effectiveness. Increased competition, changes in government reimbursement, and decreased hospital revenues have reduced intuitive managerial decision making. To avoid disastrous outcomes when making future professional and financial plans, managers need to stay well informed about the legal, political, and socioeconomic factors affecting health care.
Managers who are uninformed about the legal, political, economic, and social factors affecting health care make planning errors that may have disastrous implications for their professional development and the financial viability of the organization.
STRATEGIC pLANNING
Planning also has many dimensions. Two of these dimensions are time span and complexity or comprehensiveness. Generally, complex organizational plans that involve a long period (usually 3 to 10 years) are referred to as long-range or strategic plans. However, strategic planning may be done once or twice a year in an organization that changes rapidly. At the unit level, any planning that is at least 6 months in the future may be considered long-range planning.
Strategic planning forecasts the future success of an organization by matching and aligning an organization’s capabilities with its external opportunities. For instance, an organization could develop a strategic plan for dealing with a nursing shortage, preparing succession managers in the organization, developing a marketing plan, redesigning workload, developing partnerships, or simply planning for organizational success.
Strategic planning typically examines an organization’s purpose, mission, philosophy, and goals in the context of its external environment.
Some experts suggest, however, that value-based payment, an increased need for cost cutting, quality mandates, and the need for increased operational efficiencies will require a reconfiguration of how strategic planning is done in most health-care organizations (Operational Assessment in Strategic Planning, 2012). Instead of focusing on the external environment and the marketplace, health-care organizations will need to look closely at their competencies and weaknesses, examine their readiness for change, and identify those factors critical to achieving future goals and objectives.
This operational assessment should begin with gathering data related to financial performance, human resources, strategy, and service offerings as well as outcomes and results. Feedback from senior leadership, the medical staff, and the Board is then needed so that consensus can be obtained from stakeholders regarding the organization’s strengths and weaknesses. Then an action plan can be created that strengthens the organization’s infrastructure. The operational assessment concludes with an evaluation of how well the organization is achieving its goals and objectives and the process begins once again (Operational Assessment in Strategic Planning, 2012).
SWOT Analysis
There are many effective tools that assist in strategic planning. One of the most commonly used in health-care organizations is SWOT analysis (identification of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) (see Display 7.2). SWOT analysis, also known as TOWS analysis, was developed by Albert Humphrey at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s.
The first step in SWOT analysis is to define the desired end state or objective. After the desired objective is defined, the SWOTs are discovered and listed. Decision makers must then decide if the objective can be achieved in view of the SWOTs. If the decision is no, a different objective is selected and the process repeats.
Strengths are those internal attributes that help an organization to achieve its objectives.
Weaknesses are those internal attributes that challenge an organization in achieving its objectives.
Opportunities are external conditions that promote achievement of organizational objectives.
Threats are external conditions that challenge or threaten the achievement of organizational objectives.
DISpLAy 7.2 SWOT Definitions
Performed correctly, SWOT allows strategic planners to identify those issues most likely to impact a particular organization or situation in the future and then to develop an appropriate plan for action. Marketing Teacher Ltd. (2000–2013), however, warns that several simple rules must be followed for SWOT analysis to be successful and these are shown in Display 7.3. In essence, they suggest that honesty, specificity, simplicity, and self-awareness are integral to successful SWOT analysis.
● Be realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of your organization.
● Be clear about how the present organization differs from what might be possible in the future.
● Be specific about what you want to accomplish.
● Always apply sWOt in relation to your competitors.
● Keep sWOt short and simple.
● remember that sWOt is subjective.
Source: Adapted from Marketing Teacher Ltd. (2000–2013). SWOT analysis: Lesson. Retrieved April 22, 2013, from http://www.marketingteacher.com/wordpress/swot-analysis/
DISpLAy 7.3 Simple Rules for SWOT Analysis
Balanced Scorecard
Balanced Scorecard, developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in the early 1990s, is another tool that is highly assistive in strategic planning. Indeed, JaxWorks (2012, para 2) notes that the Harvard Business Review calls Balanced Scorecard “one of the most significant ideas of the last 75 years.”
Strategic planners using a Balanced Scorecard develop metrics (performance measurement indicators), collect data, and analyze that data from four organizational perspectives: financial, customers, internal business processes (or simply processes), and learning and growth. These measures “align individual, departmental, and organizational goals and identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives” (JaxWorks, para 7). Since all of the measures are considered to be related, and since all of the measures are assumed to eventually lead to outcomes, an overemphasis on financial measures is avoided. The scorecard then is “balanced” in that outcomes are in balance.
Balanced Scorecards also allow organizations to align their strategic activities with the strategic plan. The best Balanced Scorecards are not a static set of measurements, but instead reflect the dynamic nature of the organizational environment. Because the Balanced Scorecard is able to translate strategy into action, it is an effective tool for translating an organization’s strategic vision into clear and realistic objectives.
Strategic Planning as a Management Process
Although SWOT and Balanced Scorecard are different, they are also similar in that they can help organizations assess what they do well and what they need to do to continue to be effective and financially sound. Many other strategic planning tools exist as well, although they are not discussed in this text. Regardless of the tool(s) used, strategic planning as a management process generally includes the following steps:
1. Clearly define the purpose of the organization.
2. Establish realistic goals and objectives consistent with the mission of the organization.
3. Identify the organization’s external constituencies or stakeholders and then determine their assessment of the organization’s purposes and operations.
4. Clearly communicate the goals and objectives to the organization’s constituents.
5. Develop a sense of ownership of the plan.
6. Develop strategies to achieve the goals.
7. Ensure that the most effective use is made of the organization’s resources.
8. Provide a base from which progress can be measured.
9. Provide a mechanism for informed change as needed.
10. Build a consensus about where the organization is going.
It should be noted, though, that some critics argue that strategic planning is rarely this linear. Nor is it static. Strategic planning instead involves various actions and reactions that are partially planned and partially unplanned.
Who Should Be Involved in Strategic Planning?
Long-range planning for health-care organizations historically has been accomplished by top- level managers and the board of directors, with limited input from middle-level managers.
To give the strategic plan meaning and to implement it successfully, input from subordinates from all organizational levels may be solicited. There is increasing recognition, however, of the importance of subordinate input from all levels of the organization to give the strategic plan meaning and to increase the likelihood of its successful implementation.
The first-level manager is generally more involved in long-range planning at the unit level.
However, because the organization’s strategic plans affect unit planning, managers at all levels must be informed of organizational long-range plans so that all planning is coordinated.
All organizations should establish annual strategic planning conferences, involving all departments and levels of the hierarchy; this action should promote increased effectiveness of nursing staff, better communication between all levels of personnel, a cooperative spirit relative to solving problems, and a pervasive feeling that the departments are unified, goal directed, and doing their part to help the organization accomplish its mission.