Tourism Strategy

1. Tourism Strategy Part 4 Unit 10 Strategy Preparation, Resource Planning and Structures Professor John Tribe

2. Part 4: Strategic Implementation • The final stage of tourism corporate strategy is strategic implementation. By the end of part 4 it should be possible to construct a plan to operationalise a strategy for a tourism organisation, systematically monitor that strategy and create a comprehensive strategy document. • Strategic implementation follows logically from the previous three stages where an appropriate strategy has been selected from a number of options after a comprehensive situational analysis of the tourism organisation. • Unit10 discusses the detail of implementation in terms of financial, physical and human resources. • Unit11 examines the management of change and reviews methods of control and evaluation of strategy. • Unit12 concludes. At its centre is a guide on how to write and present a strategy document and this is followed by a look at turnaround and crisis strategies

4. Learning Outcomes • After studying this chapter and related materials you should be able to understand: • Design of an organisational structure • Resource planning • Formulation of a coordinating plan • Issues in organisational design • and critically evaluate, explain and apply the above concepts.

5. Design of Organisational Structure • An organisational structure is the framework which describes how an organisation's activities are arranged. It shows how its personnel are grouped together and the purposes of the groupings (e.g. marketing, human resource management). It shows lines of communications between groupings, organisational hierarchy and control. • Mintzberg (1979) defines an organisation's structure as "...the ways in which its labour is divided into distinct tasks and then its co-ordination achieved amongst those tasks."

6. Issues in Organisational Design • Key issues in organisational design include: • nature of structural groupings • tall vs. flat structures • bureaucratic vs. flexible • centralisation vs. decentralisation • co-ordination of structural elements

7. Resource Planning • At the implementation stage, resource planning is concerned with • identification of resources • resource fit, and • formulation of a co-ordinating plan

8. Formulation of a coordinating plan • A co-ordinating plan is a key to strategic implementation. It comprises the following elements • project logistics, (planning) • project objectives (operations) • Management by Objectives (MBO) can be an important contributor to strategic implementation. First MBO helps to clarify the strategy - what does the strategy mean in terms of measurable performance targets? Second, MBO, assists implementation since this now becomes attributable to personnel who have been assigned specific tasks.

9. Review of Key Terms • Resource planning: Identification of resources, ensuring resource fit, and formulation of a co-ordinating plan • Co-ordinating plan: A plan covering project logistics (planning) and project objectives (operations) • Logistics: The organisation and management of the flow of goods, information, human and other resources in order to achieve a particular goal. • Organisational structure: The framework which describes how an organisation's activities are arranged.

10. Discussion Questions • Discuss the suitability of using an experimental or organic type of organisational structure for a tourism organisation with which you are familiar. • Does structure follow strategy or strategy follow structure? Discuss with reference to a named tourism organisation. • Identify and explain Mintzberg's six structural elements by reference to a tourism organisation you are familiar with. • Prepare a project plan which demonstrates the logistics of a named tourism strategy. • Identify the type of organisational structure which exists for a named tourism organisation. Is this structure appropriate for the future?

11. Tourism Strategy Part 4 Unit 10 Strategy Preparation, Resource Planning and Structures The End