Drawback in corporate planning

Ramani Kangaraarachchi

There is a drawback in corporate planning in Sri Lanka due to lack of practical application in management techniques, Group Director Capital Maharaja Angelo M.Patrick said.

Addressing participants on “Business Planning Revolutionised by Balance Scorecard” at the CMA Business Management Conference on Wednesday he said the lack of clear distinction between Vision and Mission is one of the main reasons to this situation.

He pointed out that very often after several hours of discussions, lengthy paragraphs are written under both captions using a choice of well blended words spelling out more of the corporate virtues than what the business is all about.

Traditionally lofty vision statements have been written and these are out of step in terms of operations. He stated that these statements do not easily translate into operational terms to provide useful guides to action at local level.

Patrick pointed out that the vision should be an integrated set of objectives and measures which could be easily recalled by employees at all levels in the organisation.

Corporate planning has been relegated to a team of senior managers with the CEO having little or no part in the formulation. It is another reason for their inability to carry forward the plans to the implementation phase.

Patrick said that the technique itself has an inherent drawback in that it measures objectives and not actions. Therefore he introduced four steps in refining the traditional Corporate Planning by addressing the above deficiencies.

They are developing objectives in terms of customer perspectives, financial perspectives, internal business process, and innovation and learning which would result in achieving the objectives set out for each perspective.

The theme of the conference of the Society of Certified Management Accountants Sri Lanka this year was “Corporate Bottom Line Management.