We live in a very competitive reality, the capitalist environment is one in which companies are always forced to fight to stay on top or go bankrupt. Society is always in constant change and with it its standards, values and individuals are also always changing. It is also good to point out that technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace, forcing society itself to adapt to a reality that is increasingly technological, digital and different from what we are used to experiencing.
For an organization, to remain in such a hostile, inconsistent and challenging environment is not an easy task. Staying in the marketplace requires that you are always up to date and ahead of your competitors, that you have the ability to quickly adapt to the new and mysterious challenges that arise, and that you have the ability to keep up with the pace while doing all this. That's where Need Planning and Forecasting comes in.
One of the pillars of management is planning, the act of creating a plan to achieve a certain goal. Knowing how to plan is a capacity highly valued and generally desired, for companies, to have an employee or manager who knows how to prepare for the future, mobilize resources and efforts in the best possible way to achieve a future goal is a unique resource. Why? Because it keeps them competitive in the market. Knowing how to achieve your goals by spending less resources and time than your rivals is a huge advantage, especially in a scenario as hostile and not merciful as the one already mentioned, one in which the smallest of errors is able to cost an entire organization.
Now this competence, although valuable, is composed of very simple aspects:
Mission, Vision and Values - The Mission comprises the reason for the company's existence. The Vision understands what the company wants to achieve and where it wants to go. The Values are irrevocable principles that guide all actions of the organization.
- Environment Analysis (External/Internal) - This aspect translates into the organization's ability to analyze and understand all the internal factors of the company that affect its operations as well as understand the influence that external factors have on its operations, directly or indirectly.
- Define your objectives - Of course every company already has a goal in its mission, but this aspect includes goals and objectives for the near future. These objectives, or secondary goals, help the company to guide its actions, defining what it intends to achieve in a near moment and thus work to achieve its mission one day. It is also important to make it clear that these goals must be attainable, relevant, measurable and capable of being achieved in the near future (12 months).
- Define an action plan - Basically the methodology that the company will use to achieve these objectives mentioned in the previous topic. Defining what to do, why do it, where to do it, when to do it and who will do it.
Measuring and monitoring results - The final step is to track the progress of actions when they are taken, because it is vitally important for the organisation to have a sense of whether what has been planned is evolving as expected or whether there is a need to make certain adjustments.
With good planning, a company is able to maintain itself in even the most competitive markets, preparing to face problems and its rivals with an action plan ready to guide its operations. Now, we will cover another tool of extreme importance and until then not approached in depth, the Needs Forecast.
The planning and operation of an organization are only possible if it has the resources and capital to carry out these tasks, and there enters the importance of a good management of its future needs. The forecast of needs consists, basically, of analyses carried out by specialists about the operations and history of the company to determine the resources that it will need in the future and when it will need them. It is a simple action, but one that helps companies a lot, because if they know what they will need and when they will need it they can plan their operations more effectively, preparing in advance to acquire these resources in the best possible way and before the lack of them damages the organization.
Another important point to emphasize is that, for a good functioning of the company and its planning it is necessary that it is willing to use the most qualified people that it has at its disposal, that it hires the best employees and that, in general, it uses its human capital in the best possible way. But the reality is different, the focus of this text is to approach tools that help an organization to compete in the market and for this we must also approach an extremely negative aspect that, besides being an enormous disrespect, aggression and insult, also limits companies, this aspect is that of discrimination.
Unfortunately, we still live in a reality in which the most qualified person for a service or position may be rejected because of a pre-established prejudice against them. That a person can be forced into a position in which he or she is neither happy nor recognized simply because the one in power believes that this is his or her "place. This is an issue that must be addressed because we need to change. This kind of mentality only has negative consequences for the world and even for companies that leave talent and potential aside to satisfy a retrograde and prejudiced world perspective. In the following we will make available two videos that talk about the issue:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj0qiTHd7Jg
- > Interview with Obama. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nheqgFWj9s8&t=1s -> Discrimination case in Brazil.
These two tools are fundamental in order an organization exists in a well succeeded way in the current market, because they provide all the information that will be necessary for the realization of its activities besides enabling that they plan the most efficacious and ethical way of acting in the world.