Developing Directional Plan and its Application in One Iranian Organization

Abstract

This paper is provided from developing “directional plan” in one Iranian company that is active in public sector and its activities are mostly in science policy area. The examined organization has notable duties in developing country policies but because of different reasons they were not so successful in realizing their mission. The company has been affected from various environmental and internal factors that together make the organization planning as a wicked or messy problem. When we invited to help them in developing their (strategic) plan, we found that it is hard to set a (strategic) planning model and obey its process without caring about the situation in which it was working. The main problem was in this issue that the managers were not ready to design a plan and be committed to its implementation. Because of past ill-developed plans, politics considerations were notably high and the rules and procedures were usually violated. So we decided to help the managers to know why they need plan and their plan should have which kind of format and constituents. Toward this objective, we decided to map their problems systematically and show their interdependencies. Afterwards we tried to show which plans (strategies or solutions) and how they would be helpful in leading the organizations in the right way. In fact we concentrated on the first step of planning. Nowadays, organizational scholars have remarkable consensus on the importance of readiness before initiating any change or planning initiatives, so most of them suggested in auditing organization preparedness and availability of required resources (involvement and support of management via investing time and information, human, information resources) in the first steps of planning process (Senge et al,1999). In addition, agreement on change or plan objectives, expectations or their final values facilitates developing of effective plans with the high opportunity of implementation successes. This step is called differently such as “Initiating and agreeing on a strategic planning process” (Bryson, 2005), “Plan to plan” (Steiner, 1979), “Before to begin” (Niven, 2003), “Getting ready” (Allison and Jude, 1997), or “Getting started” (Ackermann and Eden, 2005). In this phase that we call it in following as a directional plan, our applied methodology was based on Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) (Eden and Ackermann, 2001; Bryson et al, 2004; Bryson and Anderson, 2000 ; Eden and Ackermann,2001). Its main steps is shown in Figure 1.