This QuickLearn provides a useful process for planning and allocating work to team members. There are 5 key steps to planning and allocating work, and they are as follows: 1. Set Direction The first step in the process is to set the direction for the......
Planning is clearly an integral part of executing a successful strategy, however simply having a plan is not enough to achieve this. There are many factors to take into account to ensure the plan is as clear and efficient as possible. First of all, the......
Many different methods for planning exist, each with their own benefits and drawbacks in different situations. No one technique will be suitable for every situation, in fact, a number of these techniques will usually be required for a successful overall strategy. Different methods are used......
Planning is essential to ensuring you achieve your goals. Completing tasks that enable you to reach your goal is crucial, and hence planning these tasks must be done first. A good plan identifies causes and effects in achievable stages and all good plans must begin......
SMART is a useful guide for setting objectives – especially for performance management and personal development. The letters stand for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. Specific Specific goals are clear and unambiguous. They outline exactly what is to be accomplished and by whom. It......
Unfortunately, every strategy or project has a budget and keeping to this strict guideline, whilst completing the entirety of a task, is often the biggest challenge to any project manager. To ensure this is done efficiently, unnecessary tasks or projects need to be stopped while the......
Many different strategic planning tools helping organisations to compete effectively exist. One of the most famous of these is Ohmae’s 3C Model, developed in 1982. The model integrates what the author believes to be the 3 most critical elements that managers initiating a strategy should......
The Boston Matrix Model, devised by Bruce Henderson, is a tool for assessing the market potential of products and services already in production, as well as ones in a more infant stage. Once the product or service has been defined in the table below a......
A range of tools can be used to plan, implement, or evaluate a strategy. These tools are useful as getting small tasks wrong, such as not identifying relevant stakeholders, can have significant consequences for the overall strategy. Trend Analysis: Identifying trends, whether they are within......
Due to rapid and unpredictable changes to the economic and political environments, traditional long-term planning methods have become less effective in recent years. For this reason, scenario planning, whereby various future scenarios are predicted and planned for, has become a popular approach. The ideal outcome......
Gary Hamel’s ‘New Innovation Solution’, in his book “Leading the Revolution” (2000), is one of the most well-known explanations of how best to give ideas the best possible opportunity to flourish, whilst also not wasting resources on weak ideas. He carefully explains how best to......
Corporate entrepreneurship, also known as having a creativity culture within an organisation, encourages employees to be innovative and think freely, without being constrained by the status quo. It is not only important for individuals to be creative, but also to exist within an environment that......
Innovation and creativity are amongst the most important drivers of business growth and never has this been more the case than in the saturated, rapidly-evolving markets of the 21st century. Disregarding these ideas, as current consumers do not use them and they may not make......
Weisbord’s 6 box model is a framework developed to diagnose organisational issues that are not obvious to senior management. The model outlines six possible areas of investigation to look into when looking to find areas where the organisation is not functioning as efficiently as it......
Many factors affect the problem solving process and hence it can become complicated and drawn out when they are unaccounted for. Acknowledging the factors that affect the process and taking them into account when forming a solution gives teams the best chance of solving the......
The drill down technique is an excellent problem solving method for getting to the root of the problem. Often, the problem causing the company grief is clear, but tackling this problem effectively can only occur if the factors causing this problem are determined. The drill......
The 6 Thinking Hats methodology for solving problems, developed by Edward De Bono, is often used by teams to tackle complex organisational problems. The idea behind it is that different responsibilities are given to different individuals in order to bring different perspectives for how to......
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a problem solving technique that emphasises what has worked well in the past, rather than what has gone wrong, when addressing an existing problem. Focusing on what has previously worked well allows individuals to develop solutions to the problem, through improvements......
A variety of problems regularly arise in everyday working environments, and hence a variety of solutions are required to solve them. These solutions require a great deal of thought, time, investigation and resources, meaning getting problem solving right can have very important consequences for your......