Strategic Marketing: Planning and Control, Third Edition

accepted by team members. A useful acronym is to develop SMART

objectives. These add focus and relate to the task(s) required.

S– Specific. They should be clear and task orientated.

M– Measurable. Objectives must be measured in order to establish

progress.

A– Action. They should be task related and promote activity.

R– Resourced. A realistic resource base has to be allocated to enable

progress.

T– Time. There is a need to make the objective time focused. How long

will it take?

● Planning

Having established what is to be achieved. Planning breaks an activity

into a series of structured manageable tasks, co-ordinates these tasks

and monitoring progress.

Tasks can happen in series or parallel. So-called ‘parallel processing’ –

running several tasks simultaneously, has several advantages.

Namely, it can reduce the overall time scale for the project and

reduce the risk of a delay in one task delaying the entire project

(Figure 13.8).

268 Strategic Marketing: Planning and Control

Table 13.2 Project management

• Objective setting •Team building


• Planning •Crisis


• Delegation •Management

Time saving

Task A Task B Task C

Task A

Task B

Task C

Figure 13.8
Serial versus parallel
processing