To: John Parker - Director, Information Systems Division
It appears that the planning efforts of the past few years have indeed produced some positive results, but that certain weaknesses still exist and require special attention. Among the gains, I believe that advances have been made in clarifying the process for systems managers, and in developing a "common language" for the terms and concepts used in the planning process.
As you know, there continue to be wide differences in the consistency, quality, completeness and accuracy of the plans being submitted by the divisions. The source of these variations has been identified as the degree of participation between systems managers and line managers. Where participation is high and line managers provide specifics about how they will achieve objectives, their needs are more accurately represented and are supported by systems plans. These plans are more complete and of a higher quality than those from divisions where systems managers develop the plans independently. There is a need to get all line managers directly involved as active participants in the process.
There is also a need to build more flexibility into the corporate planning process. Currently, if projects are not in-cluded in division plans, there is no chance that they will receive approval for inclusion in the division's budget. More complete division plans will partially remedy this problem. But the lack of flexibility is still a weakness because it does not allow for adjustments to opportunities or problems which could develop even after a complete division plan has been submitted.
Recommendation #1: Develop more complete planning instruc-tions which provide guidelines for the type of information needed by the planning process, as well as guidelines for how the infor-mation should be gathered. Currently, the instructions do little more than describe how to fi
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