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Aplan is typically anydiagram or list of steps with details of timing and resources, used to achieve anobjective to do something. It is commonly understood as atemporalset of intended actions through which one expects to achieve agoal.
Forspatial orplanartopologic ortopographic sets seemap.
Plans can be formal or informal:
The most popular ways to describe plans are by their breadth, time frame, and specificity; however, these planning classifications are not independent of one another. For instance, there is a close relationship between the short- and long-term categories and the strategic and operational categories.
It is common for less formal plans to be created as abstract ideas, and remain in that form as they are maintained and put to use. More formal plans as used for business and military purposes, while initially created with and as an abstract thought, are likely to be written down, drawn up or otherwise stored in a form that is accessible to multiple people across time and space. This allows more reliable collaboration in the execution of the plan.
The termplanning implies the working out of sub-components in some degree of elaborate detail. Broader-brush enunciations of objectives may qualify as metaphoricalroadmaps. Planning literally just means the creation of a plan; it can be as simple as making alist. It has not acquired a technical meaning, however, to cover the area ofgovernmentlegislation andregulations elated to the use of resources.
Planning can refer to the planned use of any and all resources, as in the succession ofFive-Year Plans through which the government of theSoviet Union sought to develop the country. However, the term is most frequently used in relation to planning for the use of land and related resources, for example inurban planning,transportation planning, etc.
In a governmental context, "planning" without any qualification is most likely to mean the regulation ofland use. See alsozoning.
Planners are the professionals that have the requisite training to take or make decisions that will help or balance the society in order to have a functional, aesthetic, and convenient environment.
Concepts such astop-down planning (as opposed to bottom-up planning) reveal similarities with thesystems thinking behind thetop-down model.
The subject touches such broad fields aspsychology,game theory,communications andinformation theory, which inform the planning methods that people seek to use and refine; as well aslogic andscience (i.e. methodological naturalism) which serve as a means of testing different parts of a plan for reliability or consistency.
The specific methods used to create and refine plans depend on who is to make it, who is to put it to use, and what resources are available for the task. The methods used by anindividual in his or hermind orpersonal organizer, may be very different from the collection of planning techniques found in acorporate board-room, and the planning done by aproject manager has different priorities and uses different tools to the planning done by anengineer orindustrial designer.
