Tactical Planning Essay

In order to lead successful life, management is needed to achieve goals or target. Management is process of getting things done in the best and cheapest manner. Management is found in every walk of life, for instance, in the business field, in education and even at home. The most critical key factor in management is planning. Planning focuses on achieving organizational goals. In general, planning can be classified into three major categories which are strategic planning, tactical planning and operational planning.

First type of planning is strategic planning. Strategic planning is an action that identifies and sets priorities activities, focuses energy and resources in the respective departments, strengthens and enhances the firm’s operation,

What is tactical planning? Tactical planning can be described as a short term planning that changes the in progress operations of several parts of the organization. According to Daft (2010), this plan helps to eliminate the major strategic plans and achieve a specific part of the company’s strategy. Managers use tactical planning to draft several parts of the organization to be successful organizational within one year or less into the future. For an example, tactical plans include the organizational increasing sales of a certain amount within a one year time frame or they can commit to add a new group of customers during their planned time frame. There are differences between strategic planning and tactical planning. One being, strategic planning is usually handled by the upper management but tactical planning is handled by middle level management. This is because the upper management generally has a better understanding of the organization as a whole and middle level management generally has a better understanding of the day to day organizational operations. Besides that, strategic planning highlights the future while tactical planning highlights the everyday function of the organization. Lastly, strategic planning usually covers a long time period, whereas tactical planning usually covers a shorter time period (The Pennsylvania State University,

Daft (2012) stated that operational planning specifies the action steps toward accomplishing operational goal and support tactical activities. Unlike strategic planning which is about setting a direction for the organization, operational plan does present detailed information which direct people to carry out day-to-day task needed in the running of organization. The major aspect in operational planning is management by objectives. Management by objective is a system where by the goals for every department and projects are defined clearly and use to monitor progress and performance. Management by objectives do provides organization with ‘3H1W’ concept. What task should be done? Who should direct the task? Where is the task to be performed? And lastly, how much to be spent on the task? Basically, operational planning can be divided into two types, which are single use plan and standing plan (Shahzrol Aman,