Key Skills of Management – Planning & Organising

Introduction

Who’s it for?

A great aid for any manager looking for techniques and processes that allow them to manage their business or section of business more efficiently and effectively. Also ideal for trainee managers shortly to take up their first managerial role.

How do you define the skill of Planning and Organising? – Yes, it is a skill It is defined as having the ability to organise your own activities and the actions of your team to accomplish pre-agreed objectives.

An organisational plan is the structure within which people’s actions and decisions are framed, so that the organisation moves towards its objectives in an efficient and consistent manner. The net result of this exercise must be the achievement of those all-important targets and objectives.

Planning has always been part of the organisational process. Let’s go way back to the Ancient Egyptians – when they built the Pyramids, they didn’t just let it happen, they MADE it happen with a plan. They planned for slave labour to cut the stone and bring it to the building site. They planned a system for hauling the stones to their appointed place in the design plan. They planned that the Pyramid should be completed before the Pharaoh died. They were obviously good planners even if their human relation attitudes left much to be desired and is best left to history!!

Planning tells us who will do what, when and to what standard.

If planning was important to the Egyptians, it is even more important to us now. Building the Pyramids was a comparatively simple, if rather arduous task. It could be broken down into a fairly small number of component parts, such as cutting stone, transporting stone, shaping stone and placing stone in place. It was extremely labour intensive and further labour was always available.

Today, as is pretty obvious, industry is far more complex. Take a manufacturing business as an example. The number of components in even a simple product often runs into hundreds, often bought in from outside suppliers from global sources and all have to be brought together at the same time to complete the product. Many people have to do the right thing, at the right time, to the right standard to avoid hold ups in the production line. This remains the case even in highly automatic processing where robots carry out the work – but humans still must play their part.

Within each overall plan, each individual must be working to a plan which interlocks with every other person’s plan to produce, in effect, a small array of production workers who all work in step. This series will take you through the skills required to become a highly effective planner and organiser from your management position…