Planning and Managing Change in Business Strategy

Strategic management can best be accomplished by using the Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling method. POLC is vital because it gives managers a systematic way to analyze their environment, assess their organization's strengths and weaknesses and find opportunities for developing a competitive edge. (Robbins & Coulter 2008)

Planning must be effective by developing specific plans that are flexible, adaptable and can be continued even in an uncertain environment. Budgeting is numerical plans for allocating resources to specific functions. Scheduling sets the details of allocation with what, who, when functions are to be completed. Breakeven Analysis identifies when total revenue is sufficient for total costs of functions. Linear Programming solves resource allocation problems mathematically. (Robbins & Coulter 2008)

To analyze their environment, management must perform the following:

1) An environmental scan - Environmental scanning is screening a vast quantity of information for changes, actual and anticipated, in the environment.
2) Forecasting -Forecasting is predicting the outcomes through either Quantitative or Qualitative styles. Quantitative applies mathematical rules to past data. Qualitative uses the opinions and judgments of well informed individuals.
3) Benchmarking - Benchmarking is examining other competitors' practices for the best practices that could lead to greater performance. (Robbins & Coulter 2008)

Purposes for organizing help meet the organizational needs, by giving structural design to how the jobs will be accomplished. Division of workload can most effectively be done through work specification, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, centralization, decentralization and formalization. (Robbins & Coulter 2008)

Leading can be appropriately applied by clarification of both short and long term goals, dealing with and resolving conflicts through coaching team members and helping assist change when necessary. (Robbins & Coulter 2008)

Controlling is the monitoring of work activities to see that they are being successfully accomplished while correcting any notable deviations. Three types of controlling, listed below, can be interchanged in response to changing environmental conditions:

1) Market Control stresses external market procedures to establish standards in the control system.
2) Bureaucratic Control deals with organizational authority. It relies on administrative policies and procedures.
3) Clan Control controls the employee behaviors through shared values, traditions and other organizational cultural factors.

An effective control system incorporates input of people, materials and information transformed through the organization's Human Resource Management process into output of finished services and/or goods. (Robbins & Coulter 2008)

Reference

Robbins, S.P. & Coulter, M., (2008). Management (9th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ; Prentice Hall

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