Advantages of Planning and Disadvantages of Planning

 Advantages of Planning

Planning has the following advantages:

1. Planning focuses on objectives. This is important so as not to commit the limited resources of the organization into unprofitable actions. 
2.  It off sets uncertainties by making the manager to develop some confidence which will enable him to take decisions with some degree of certainty. 
3.  It minimizes waste before careful analysis would have been made with respect to the critical activities that need to be performed in other to realize the objective or give solution to the problem. All unwanted activities are isolated and thrown away. 
4. Planning also ensures control through measurement and feedback. This is important so as to avoid unnecessary expenditure of resources. 

 Disadvantages of Planning

1. The effectiveness of planning depends on the quality of data gathered and the assumptions made from them. If the quality is poor and assumptions not correct. They can adversely affect future of the results. 
2. Planning is expensive as it involves considerable amount of time and money 
3.  Planning delays action because it is only when the plan is completed that the desired action can take place. 

CONCLUSION

We have seen what forecasting is and the usefulness of forecasting in the management process. Also, that in practice, both forecasting and planning goes hand in hand together. We examined the features of planning as well as the relevant steps that the manager needs to follow in other to draw an effective plan. These steps involve defining the problem, collecting relevant data, analyzing the data to separate the grains from the chaff and then building viable solutions. Other steps are selecting the most feasible solution from the alternatives, implementation and then controlling through measurement and feedback. Planning also has its own advantages and limitations and we considered all these.

SUMMARY

We have treated two management functions - forecasting and planning, though in practice the two become one since they cannot be separated. We saw the steps in planning as well as the advantages and some setbacks of planning. We drew an important conclusion, namely, that the steps in planning are also the relevant steps in decision making. This means that the planning process is also the decision making process.