Week 7: Scenario Planning---Lisa

As the adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence, scenario planning is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. (Wikipedia) By staying in HSBC as an intern for only two months, I really didn't know much things about the management strategies inside the company. However, as an international famous bank, HSBC inevitably has corresponding strategies to meet with the severe competitions in the market. For example, to reduce input costs and simultaneously maintain the quality of client services, including data analysis and call center services, a operation center of HSBC has been established in Mainland China to replace that of Hong Kong.

From my own observations during that period of time, such an international bank does need to do some scenario planning to seek for continuous development and meet with any potential challenges in the future. There are two major objectives that all of the departments can take into considerations: to enable the employees to be competitive internationally and to manage the knowledge base effectively. Only in that way can the company achieve better development when unpredicted resignation and critical incident occur.

As for the process of scenario planning, it can be described into six steps.

1. Identify focal Issue
  To identify the number of people, relationships, technology, leadership style that will be involved in the scenario planning.

2. Driving forces
   To identify the necessities and reasons of such scenario planning, including the further development of employees, the prevention of potential problems.

3. Find uncertainties
   Uncertainties may occur in the application procedures.

4. Formulate scenario logic
    Scenario planning can be divided into two parts:
       a. Competitiveness improvement of employees
           Organizational online forum dealing with the specific problems all over the world as well as offline training course/workshops can be established.
       b. Knowledge Base Management
           A knowledge management center may be set up to store the existed explicit knowledge and codify tacit knowledge from talented people or good solutions.

5.Strategic Analysis
      SWOT method can be adopted to evaluate the strategies.


Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenario_planning