While most leaders recognize the value of good planning, most lack the experience and methods to do it systematically. As a result, group planning efforts are often frustrating, generating plans that are shallow and poorly understood by those who must carry them out. The seven management and planning tools are a set of easy to use, systematic methods from the quality management literature that can help planning teams in the same way that the familiar quality improvement tools like flow charts and histograms aid problem-solving teams.