Often structured, plans can occur in projects, diplomacy, careers, economic development, military campaigns or in the conduct of some business.
The term planning implies the working out of sub-components in some degree of detail. Broader-brush enunciations of objectives may qualify as metaphorical road maps.
Methodology
The discipline of planning has occupied great minds and theoreticians. Concepts such as top-down planning (as opposed to bottom-up planning) reveal similiarities with the systems thinking behind the Top-Down Model.
Types of plan
Economic planning became an important discipline in the Soviet Union and in Japan -- in the West the word "planner" may rather evoke images of town planning.
In military usage, the grand structured pre-set plans of World War I became the more flexible and less pretentious limited-objective operations of World War II and later.
Examples of plans
Notable plans include:
See also: Planned unit development.