Characteristics of Planning -Planning as an intellectual process, conscious determination of courses of action, the basing of decisions on purpose, facts and considered estimates.
We can use six important points to represent characteristics of the planning, These points follow:
- Primacy - Planning is the starting point of all managerial activities.
- Purpose - Planning to have its endpoint as an achievement of the firm's objectives.
- Process - The activities involved in the planning are intellectual, selective, continuous and flexible.
- Premises - Planning does not start in a vacuum but needs some basis to start with, like various assumptions for the decisions of the future, and these assumptions are called premises.
- Pervasiveness - As we shall see presently, starts at the top and cascades down the organization down to the shop-floor and thus pervades all levels of management.
- Efficiency - Contribution to purpose OR objectives must be greater than costs and other consequences required to formulate and operate.
Definition of planning is the first management of business plan/function. Planning is the starting point of the plan all managerial or business activity.