Planning as a basic function of management is a principal duty of all managers. It is a systematic process and requires knowledgeable activity based on sound managerial theory. Being the first element of management defined by Fayol, planning is making a plan of action to provide for the foreseeable future. This plan of action must have unity, continuity, flexibility, and precision.
Planning is a continuous process, beginning with the setting of goals and objectives and then laying out a plan of action for accomplishing them, putting them into play, reviewing the process and the outcomes, providing feedback to personnel, and modifying plans as needed. As planning is put into action, the management functions of organizing, leading, and evaluating are implemented, making all management functions interdependent.
Planning is a thinking or mental process of decision making and forecasting. It is future oriented and ensures desirable probable outcomes. Likewise, it involves determining objectives and strategies, programs, procedures, and rules to accomplish the objectives. In nursing, planning helps to ensure that clients or patients will receive the nursing services they want and need and that these services are delivered by satisfied nursing workers.
Planning should be based on objectives that should be framed in terms of making a product or providing a service for the community. Simplification and standardization are basic to sound planning procedures. The product or service should be of the right pattern. Planning provides information to coordinate work effectively and accurately. A good plan should be based on an objective, be simple, have standards, be flexible, be balanced, and use available resources first.
Planning improves with experience, gives sequence in activity, and protects a business against undesirable changes. Fayol's concept was that planning facilitates wise use of resources and selection of the best approaches to achieving objectives. Planning facilitates the art of handling people. It requires moral courage, since it can fail. Effective planning requires continuity of tenure. Good planning is a sign of competence.
TYPES OF PLANNING
Strategic Planning
Drucker defines strategic planning as "a continuous, systematic process of making risk-taking decisions today with the greatest possible knowledge of their effects on the future; organizing efforts necessary to carry out these decisions and evaluating results of these decisions against expected outcome through reliable feedback mechanisms." Nursing administrators can increase effectiveness through strategic planning, which can promote professional nursing practice and the long-range goals of the organization and the division of nursing.
Strategic planning in nursing is concerned with what nursing should be doing. Its purpose is to improve allocation of scarce resources, including time and money, and to manage the agency for performance. Strategic planning provides strategic forecasting from one year up to more than twenty years. It should involve top nurse managers and representatives of all levels of nursing management and practice. It will include analysis of such factors as projected technological advances, the internal and external environments, the nursing and health-care market and industry, the economics of nursing and health care, availability of human and material resources, and judgments of top management.
In today's world, the strategic planning process is used to acquire and develop new health-care services and product lines, including new nursing services and products. Strategic planning is also used to remove outdated services and products. Both activities present moral and ethical dilemmas for the managers and practitioners of nursing. Strategic planning can foster better goals, better corporate values, and better communication about corporate direction. It can lead to changes in operating management and organization. Strategic planning can produce better management strategy and analysis and can forecast and mute external threats.
Odiorne recommends the following process for crafting a strategic plan:
1. Identify the major problems of your organization, determining where you are headed and where you want to be. This is "gap analysis," a technique to examine markets, products, customers, employees, finances, technology, and community relations. Cabinets or task forces from each area may be helpful in doing gap analysis and identifying major problems.
2. Examine outside influences that relate to the key problems of your organization. Focus on the few major issues.
3. List the critical issues: those that affect the entire organization, have long-term impact, and are based on irrefutable evidence rather than media hype.
4. Rank the critical issues according to their importance to your organization and plan accordingly: "must do" and "to do" and "important but not urgent." Then divide them into "success producers" and "failure preventers.''
5. Decide the critical issues to all organization managers.
6. Include time in the budget.
Strategic plans should be developed from the bottom up, the front line where business occurs. The written plan should be shared with everyone, should not be slavishly followed, as it will be constantly affected by change, and should be modified every year.
How Strategic Planning Can Be Used to Improve Nursing Management
§ To provide accountability and monitoring of performance; to tie merit to performance.
§ To set up more formal planning programs and require divisional and unit planning.
§ To integrate strategic plans with operational and financial plans.
§ To improve knowledge of and training in strategic planning.
§ To increase top management involvement and commitment.
§ To improve focus on competition, market segments, and external factors.
§ To improve communication from top administration and nursing management.
§ To allow better execution of plans.
§ To be more realistic, and less rationalizing and vacillating.
§ To improve the development of nursing management strategies.
§ To improve the development and communication of nursing management goals.
§ To put less emphasis on raw numbers.
§ To anticipate the future and plan for it.
§ To develop the annual budget.
§ To focus on quality outputs that will improve nurse performance and productivity, decrease losses, and increase return on equity.
Summary of Phases of Strategic Planning Process
PHASE 1: The Mission and the Creed
Develop statements that define the work, the aims, and the character of the division of nursing. These include idea statements of shared values and beliefs. They are called mission (or purpose) and creed (or philosophy) statements and relate to personnel, patients, community, and all other potential customers.
PHASE 2: Data Collection and Analysis
Collect and analyze data about the health-care industry and nursing. Such data should include internal forces that define the work and affect employees, clients, stockholders, and creditors; technological advances; threats; opportunities to improve growth and productivity; external forces, such as competition, communities, government and political issues, and legal requirements; marketing and public relations or image; trends in the physical and social work environments; and communication. Use simple and complex forecasting techniques, including trend lines, group consensus, nominal group process, and a qualitative decision matrix that uses probabilities based on conditions of certainty, risk, and uncertainty.
PHASE 3: Assess Strengths and Weaknesses
Define those factors from the data analysis that influence the management of the division of nursing. List them as strengths or opportunities that will facilitate effectiveness and achievement of goals and objectives or as weaknesses or threats that will impede achieving goals and objectives. Define the current position and strength of the unit.
PHASE 4: Goals and Objectives
Write realistic and general statements of goals. Break the goals down into concrete written statements of objectives the division of nursing intends to accomplish in the next three to five years.
PHASE 5: Strategies
Identify untoward conditions that could develop in achieving each objective. Note administrative actions to avoid or manage them. Use this information to modify goals and objectives, making contingency plans for alternative actions. Define the organization needed for doing and implementing strategic plans. It should be interactive if cross-functional activities are involved in a matrix organization.
PHASE 6: Timetable
Develop a timetable for accomplishing each objective. Identify by geographic units as well. This phase will produce or become part of the plans.
PHASE 7: Operational and Functional Plans
Provide guidelines or general instructions that lead the functional and operational nurse managers to develop action plans to implement the goals and objectives. These will include detailed actions, policies, practices, communication and feedback, controlling and evaluation plans, budgets, timetables, and persons to be held accountable.
PHASE 8: Implementation
Put the plans to work.
PHASE 9: Evaluation
Provide for formative evaluation reports before, during, and after the operational plan is implemented. Provide for summative evaluation that is quantified. Report actual versus expected results. Frequently evaluate the strategic mission and plan. Provide continuous feedback that can be used to modify and update the plan. Use people who implement the plan to evaluate it.
Operational Planning
Operational management is the organization and directing of the delivery of nursing care. It includes such planning as creating a budget, creating an effective organizational structure that encompasses a quality monitoring process, and directing nurse leaders, an administrative staff, and new programs.
Operational plans are everyday working management plans developed from both long-range objectives and the strategic planning process and short range or tactical plans. In development of operational objectives, new strategic objectives can emerge or old ones can be modified or discarded. Strategic and tactical plans are made into operational plans and carried out at all levels of nursing management, not just at the patient-care level.
Operational managers develop goals, objectives, strategies, and targets to set the strategic plan in motion. They match each unit goal or objective to a strategic goal or objective. Their objectives can be much more detailed and specific than the strategic objectives. Numerous operational objectives can support one strategic objective.
All aspects of an operational plan are based on goals and their achievement. The individual leadership style determines whether goal setting will be of the top-down or bottom-up variety. Bottom-up goal setting is participatory, using guidelines from the operational manager. Participatory goal setting is believed to increase workers' commitment and achievement. Increased participation leads to greater group cohesiveness, which in turn fosters increased morale, increased motivation, and increased achievement and productivity. Individuals, including professional nurses, can ensure greater relative success in achievement of goals by building in some slack in terms of projected resources and time. Nurses who reject goals of participating staff should explain their reasons for rejection. Participation in goal setting does not alone ensure success
The goal is to plan, assess progress toward goals and objectives at all levels, and provide feedback to all levels of management. Efficiency is also a goal; all levels of management should guard against unnecessary time spent in meetings. As organizing changes are occurring, controlling activities are in operation and activities are being evaluated.
NATURE OF PLANNING
The nature of planning can be highlighted by studying its characteristics. They are as follows:
(a) Planning is a mental activity. Planning is not a simple process. It is an intellectual exercise and involves thinking and forethought on the part of the manager.
(b) Planning is goal-oriented. Every plan specifies the goals to be attained in the future and the steps necessary to reach them. A manager cannot do any planning, unless the goals are known.
(c) Planning is forward looking. Planning is in keeping with the adage, “look before you leap”. Thus planning means looking ahead. It is futuristic in nature since it is performed to accomplish some objectives in future.
(d) Planning pervades all managerial activity. Planning is the basic function of managers at all levels, although the nature and scope of planning will vary at each level.
(e) Planning is the primary function. Planning logically precedes the execution of all other managerial functions, since managerial activities in organizing; staffing, directing and controlling are designed to support the attainment of organizational goals. Thus, management is a circular process beginning with planning and returning to planning for revision and adjustment.
(f) Planning is based on facts. Planning is a conscious determination and projection of a course of action for the future.
PURPOSES OF PLANNING
The following are some reasons for planning:
1. Planning increases the chances of success by focusing on results, not on activities.
2. It forces analytic thinking and evaluation of alternatives, therefore improving decisions.
3. It establishes a framework for decision making that is consistent with top management objectives.
4. It orients people to action instead of reaction.
5. It includes day-to-day and future-focused managing.
6. It helps to avoid crisis management and provides decision-making flexibility.
7. It provides a basis for managing organizational and individual performance.
8. It increases employee involvement and improves communication.
9. It is cost-effective.
Among the activities of planning that Douglass addresses are assessment by collection, classification, analysis, interpretation, and translation of data; strategic planning; development of standards; identification of needs and priority setting; management by objectives; and formulation of policies, rules, regulations, methods, and procedures.
Donovan wrote that planning has several benefits, among which are satisfactory outcomes of decisions; improved functions in emergencies; assurance of economy of time, space, and materials; and the highest use of personnel. She included decision making, philosophies, and objectives as key elements in planning.
Swansburg, Russell and Swansburg, Richard. Introductory Management and Leadership
for Nurses: An Interactive Text, 2nd edition. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, Inc.1999