What are the barriers to effective planning and how the organisation can overcome them?
2 years ago
Principle of Management
There are a number of factors that may limit the effectiveness of plans, these are:
- Lack of Environmental Awareness: manager may not have sufficient knowledge about the organisation to embark on the planning process. Such information includes information on profitability, and more importantly, information on which resources to use for achieving organisational goals.
- Lack of organisational Knowledge: This usually emanates from the manager’s who have lack of confidence in their abilities, and have no knowledge about the organisation in terms of goals, sub-units
- Resistance to Change: Changing the organisation’s current situation is one of the consequences of planning and some members may resent This tends to reduce the effectiveness of planning.
- Time and Expense: Planning costs money and time, and sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Some members may be unwilling to make such sacrifices, preferring instead to tackle problems as they arise.
- Lack of Knowledge of the Benefits from Planning: If organisational members are not enlightened on the benefits from planning they may not be keen to implement plans.
- Lack of Involvement: If those who are supposed to implement the plans are not involved in the planning, they may not be enough information to enable effective planning.
- Lack of Managerial Commitment or Support: it should be borne in mind that top managerial support is instrumental foe effective planning since it ensures that all the policy frameworks is set in place and that all the required resources are provided.
There are various ways of making planning more effective, and hereunder we enumerate more important ones.
- Top Management Support. There is need for top management to support the planning efforts of those lower down Planning starts at the top (Strategic Planning) and it is communicated downwards. This makes therefore top managerial support a prerequisite.
- Managers should realise Limitations of Planning: Planning is not a perfect solution to all problems and there is need for managers to understand the short-comings of planning g. its dependence on assumptions about the future.
- Effort must be made to include everybody: For planning to succeed, there is need for every organisational member’s participation. This is necessary at both the formulation and implementation stages so as to minimise resistance.
- Plans should be communicated to all concerned: everyone should have information about planning objectives, targets etc.
- Plans should be in accordance with Environmental Trends: Plans should be adaptable to environmental changes since; in any case, the organisation is a sub-system of the environment.
- Contingency Plans should be formulated: the organisation must have contingency plans i.e. what to do if things do not go according to plan.
Susmita Sah
Jan 13, 2022