Organizational Planning And Analysis: Building ...

In his new book, Rupert astutely illustrates applying systems theory to organizational planning for driving outcomes in a complex environment. He gives us courage to rethink planning as a dynamic and insightful process to build long term organizational capabilities.

Organizational Planning and Analysis: Building ...

To summarize this journey to maturity, the foundational stages strengthen and speed up the basic analysis and planning processes. As the function matures, you begin to look at organizational design, workforce modeling, and transition management. At the advanced stage, capability becomes strategic and focused on forward-looking organizational design, assessing the gap between actual work and target activities, competencies, and objectives for a future-ready business.

The process is usually managed by a chief financial officer (CFO) and the finance department. However, the definition can be expanded to include all areas of organizational planning including: financial planning and analysis, supply chain planning, sales planning, workforce planning and marketing planning.

Improve processes to drive performance. As a first step, FP&A leaders (with support from the CFO and others in the C-suite) should evaluate their existing processes to identify critical drivers of company performance. As the medical-device company did, a teardown and rebuild of the planning process linked to key decisions such as pricing or production can yield immediate positive benefits to raise organizational performance.

This planning model works best for organizations interested in taking on endeavors like building a team, planning an initiative, or developing an action plan. It's distinct from other models in its ability to help you differentiate between desired and actual outcomes. It also makes stakeholders more actively involved in the planning process by making them model exactly what they want out of a project.

Your responsibilities as an FP&A analyst may vary based on the size of the organization you work with. Larger corporate organizations usually have various levels of financial planning and analysis roles. For example, a typical organizational structure in a large company can include an FP&A analyst, an associate, a senior analyst, and a manager.

Senior FP&A analysts generally have over five years of experience building financial models, analyzing financial results, creating financial reports, and working as business partners to proffer financial planning recommendations. As a senior FP&A analyst, you will be responsible for reviewing financial models for completeness, reasonability, and accuracy. You will also use data visualization tools to create dashboards and reports that simplify financial results.

There are four overarching phases to the strategic planning process that include: determining position, developing your strategy, building your plan, and managing performance. Each phase plays a unique but distinctly crucial role in the strategic planning process.

Developing your strategy includes determining your primary business model and organizational purpose, identifying your corporate values, creating an image of what success would look like in 3-5 years, solidifying your competitive advantages, formulating organization wide-strategies that explain your base, and agreeing on strategic issues you need to address in the planning process. .

Once you get to the strategic plan development process in the planning process, you must begin developing your strategic framework and defining long-term strategic objectives, set short-term SMART organizational goals, and select the measure that will be your KPIs (key performance indicators.)

You can use scenario planning at the individual and departmental levels, but it is especially useful for organizational strategy planning. If your company is part of an industry that tends to be volatile or your organization itself has had to navigate costly, unexpected changes in the past, scenario planning is an excellent tool for developing your strategic vision. It can also be used to foster managerial thinking, encouraging leaders to consider the broadest range of future possibilities, and provide guidance when evaluating new projects or investment proposals.

These describe a preferred or achievable end state. These scenarios are less objective planning and more geared toward statements of goals. These goals are not necessarily about an organizational vision, but more about how the company would like to operate in the future. Normative scenarios are often combined with other types of scenario planning as they provide a summation of changes and a targeted list of activities.

SWOT analysis is a planning methodology that helps organizations build a strategic plan to meet goals, improve operations and keep the business relevant. During SWOT analysis, organizations identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (the four factors SWOT stands for) pertaining to organizational growth, products and services, business objectives and market competition.

Planning at higher levels than the neighborhood, city, or town may be necessary to address the broader conditions that affect community organization efforts. For example, the growing concentration of poverty in the urban core, a result of regional planning decisions and other broader policies, is a structural issue that affects community development efforts within inner-city neighborhoods. Although it's desirable for community building, strong local control may hinder the broader planning and coordination necessary to address local issues.

Following are some practices shared by Baldrige Award recipients (the Center for Organ Recovery & Education, Charter School of San Diego, and Memorial Hospital and Health Care Center) in the realms of selecting and using data for organizational planning and performance improvement, and performance measurement, analysis, and review, as well as to identify best practices. What could your organization learn/adapt?

However, dispersed organizational data and outdated, non-standardized reporting processes mean financial planning and analysis teams often fail to provide clear, decision-ready insights that businesses need to drive growth. Additionally, our analysis shows only 3% of companies have strategic, operational and financial planning processes that are fully aligned and integrated.

IMT 580 Management and Strategic Leadership (4)Introduction to strategic leadership of information organizations. Examines key topics drawn from organizational theory and behavior, including planning and decision-making, organizational structure, leadership, and diversity and equity. Presents the opportunity to develop and broaden understanding of strategic and operational impact of technology on organizations and their management.View course details in MyPlan: IMT 580

IMT 582 Strategic Information Initiatives (4)Tools, techniques, approaches for identifying and planning entrepreneurial initiatives within organizations, including business information assessments, organizational readiness assessments, alignment with organizational priorities, information audits, processes for obtaining organizational investment in and commitment to new initiatives. Focuses on building business and economic justifications and leading strategic initiatives in organizations.View course details in MyPlan: IMT 582

Businesses need direction and organizational goals to work toward. Strategic planning offers that type of guidance. Essentially, a strategic plan is a roadmap to get to business goals. Without such guidance, there is no way to tell whether a business is on track to reach its goals.

Office buildings represent considerable value as being fixed assets for all organizations. The primary purpose of an office building is to facilitate the provision of a workplace and working environment for information and knowledge processing activities such as filing, planning, designing, supervising, analyzing, deciding and communicating. Office buildings have been developed in response to the need to plan, coordinate and administer these activities (Aronoff and Kaplan, 1995). These activities are carried out by staff that usually occupy assigned areas within the office space, and usually are provided with desks, personal computers and other equipment that may be required within these areas. Recent trends in planning and design of office workplaces have emphasized the support of the hierarchical structure of management in the organization. Office design has been characterized by arrangement of workplaces that allow sequential processing of documents and express the hierarchical level of management positions (Szarejko and Trocka-Leszczynska, 2007).

Workplace strategies as well as layouts should be in direct response to the individual and collective requirements of the occupants (McGregor, 2000). Effective practice of space management depends on a clear understanding of the requirements and the directions of the organization (Muir, 2003). The planning of the workspace in the organization should be a response to the specific requirements of the staff and the business (McGregor and Then, 2001). Requirements in building projects define what is expected from a building solution rather than describe the solution itself. User requirements are concerned with facility characteristics that would enable users to carry out their activities efficiently, safely and with regard for occupant satisfaction. There are indeed two categories of requirements. The first type is called functional requirements, which is a collection of statements and supporting data that describe what is needed in the building (Brauer, 1992). Examples of functional requirements include workspace layout, size of personal workspace, personal work surface area, furniture, workspace storage, shared equipment and social spaces (Schwede et al, 2008). The second type is called technical requirements, which describes the technical, financial, legal matters that make a project feasible (Brauer, 1992). The two types of requirements complement each other. Together they provide a complete set of information necessary to formulate an appropriate solution. 041b061a72