Seven Management and Planning Tools

The Seven Management and Planning Tools have their roots in Operations Research work done after World War II and the Japanese total quality control (TQC) research.

Affinity diagrams are a special kind of brainstorming tool that organize large amounts of disorganized data and information into groupings based on natural relationships.

It was created in the 1960s by the Japanese anthropologist Jiro Kawakita. It is also known as KJ diagram, after Jiro Kawakita. An Affinity Diagram is used when:

1) You are confronted with many facts or ideas in apparent chaos.

2) Issues seem too large and complex to grasp.

This tool displays all the interrelated cause-and-effect relationships and factors involved in a complex problem and describes desired outcomes. The process of creating an interrelationship diagram helps a group analyze the natural links between different aspects of a complex situation.

This tool is used to break down broad categories into finer and finer levels of detail. It can map levels of details of tasks that are required to accomplish a goal or solution or task. Developing a tree diagram directs concentration from generalities to specifics.

This tool is used to prioritize items and describe them in terms of weighted criteria. It uses a combination of tree and matrix diagramming techniques to do a pair-wise evaluation of items and to narrow down options to the most desired or most effective. Popular applications for the Prioritization Matrix include return on investment (ROI) or Cost–benefit analysis (investment vs. return), time management matrix (urgency vs. importance), etc.

This tool shows the relationship between two or more sets of elements. At each intersection a relationship is either absent or present. It then gives information about the relationship, such as its strength, the roles played by various individuals or measurements. The matrix diagram enables you to analyze relatively complex situations by exposing interactions and dependencies between things. Six differently shaped matrices are possible: L, T, Y, X, C, R and roof-shaped, depending on how many groups must be compared.

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