Strategic Workplace Planning

 

 

What is Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a process whose most important product may be the process itself. It is the process, driven by a coherent vision, that determines what data should be collected and then sets up procedures for interpreting the data and transforming them into information that can help senior management weigh the risks associated with alternative courses of action.

 

Function of strategic planning

To help executives evaluate the longer term implication of alternative courses of action to make better decisions. To be useful, strategic should provide insights into:

1. The range of possible future developments and how best to prepare for them.

2. Where to allocate capital for attractive long-term returns.

3. What capacities should be developed for competitive success.

4. How to design and organize the enterprise so that various activities support one another, including making sure that the facilities and over all business plan support each other.

 

The flexibility of spatial use increases the possibility of future development

 

how Strategic planning is, at heart, concerned with resource allocation. It is forming a vision of resources can best be applied and includes establishing positions on such things as organizational structure( e.g., the location of FM function within the organization and the functions it embraces), staffing(e.g., the role of contract versus in-house staff, the kind of staff needed), the role of resources in the organization (e.g., whether property should be managed as an asset, as part of a cost center, or as administrative overhead.

Beaker,F.(1990) The Total Work Place: New York:Van Norstrand Rheinhold.......p.69

 

 

Wicked Problems

Wicked problems are problems that immensely difficult to tame because of their interdependence. Rittle identifies several characteristics of wicked problems:

1. Interconnectedness. Strong connections link each problem to other problems. As a result, these connections sometimes circle back to form feedback loops.

2. Complexity. Wicked problems have numerous important elements with relationships among them, including important feedback loops through which a change tends to multiple itself or perhaps even cancel itself out.

3. Uncertainty. Wicked problems exist in a dynamic and largely uncertain environment which creates a need to accept risk, perhaps incalculable risk. Both contingency planning and the flexibility to respond to unimagined and perhaps unimaginable contingencies thus are necessary.

4. Ambiguity. The problem can be seen indifferent ways, depending on the viewer personal characteristics, loyalties, past experience, and even accidental circumstances of involvement.

5. Conflict. Conflicts of interest among persons or organizations with different or even antagonistic value systems are to be expected. How things will work out may depend on interaction among powerful interests that are unlikely to enter into fully cooperative arrangements.

6. Societal constraints. Social, organizational, political, and technological constraints and capabilities are central to both the feasibility and the desirability of solutions.

People sharing an office will arrange the space so that even though they are phisical close, they feel psychologically distant

 

 

Long-range strategy and overall strategy

Lauenstein describes that Long-range planning function indicates that specific actions need to be taken now to prepare for the future. It encompasses such things as creating scenarios, determining staffing requirements, and building a financial forecast under different market, economic, technical, and even political contingencies. Typically the long-range plan is modified frequently to adjust to changing conditions, and then this information is fed into each year's annual budget.

Beaker,F.(1990) The Total Work Place: New York:Van Norstrand Rheinhold. p.71

 

The workplace strategies should base on activities.(i.e. user demand)

 

 

Types of Strategies

  1. Planned strategy. Strategies originates in formal plans: precise intentions exist, are formulated and articulated by central leadership, backed up by formal control to ensure surprise-free implementation in benign, controllable, or predictable environment.
  2. Entrepreneurial strategy. Strategies originate in a central vision: intentions exist as personal, unarticulated vision of a single leader and so are adaptable to new opportunities: organization under the personal control of the leader and located in protected niche in environment strategies relatively deliberate, but can emerge.
  3. Ideological strategy. Strategies originate in shared beliefs: intentions exist as collective vision of all actors, controlled normatively through indoctrination and socialization.
  4. Umbrella strategy. Strategies originate in constraints: Leadership, in partial control of organizational actions, defines strategic boundaries or targets within which other actors respond to their own forces or to a complex, perhaps also unpredictable, environment; strategies are partly deliberate, partly emergent, and deliberately emergent.
  5. Process strategy. Strategies originate in process: Leadership controls process aspects of strategy, leaving content aspects to other actors; strategies are partly deliberate, partly emergent.
  6. Unconnected. Strategies originate in enclaves: Actors loosely coupled to rest of organization produce patterns in their own actions in the absence of, or in direct contradiction to, central or common intentions; stratgies organizationally emergent whether or not deliberate for actors.
  7. Consensus strategy. Strategies originate in consensus: Through mutual adjustment, actors converge on patterns that become pervasive in the absence of central or common intentions; strategies rather emergent.
  8. Imposed Strategy. Strategies originate in environment: Environment dictates patterns in actions either through direct imposition or implicitly pre-empting of binding organizational choice. These strategies most emergent, although they may be internalized by organization and made deliberate.

Beaker,F.(1990) The Total Work Place: New York:Van Norstrand Rheinhold.Source: p.73

 

Employee participation is a key issue of workplace strategy

 

 

Integrated Workplace Strategy

For strategic workplace planning to be successful, the workplace needs to be treated as a system. As a result, workplace strategies should be integrated in every respect. So organizational leaders should consider the following issues when considering their planning strategies:

  1. System interdependency
  2. Changing expectations
  3. The right technology
  4. Education and training
  5. Performance assessment
  6. Employee participation
  7. Process versus solution approaches
  8. Organizational Leadership

( Franklin Becker and Fritz Steele, "Workplace by Design", p.146-149)

 

Stock Exchange meets the requirements of integrated workplace in many aspects