Identifying temporal relationships in educational planning

Planning is the first activity in the management of any organization or system. The whole process of planning is built around the specification of a set of key variables and the associated achievement levels. In any plan the target levels of the key variables are sought to be achieved by means of the provision of various inputs by the organization or system. One of the underlying fundamental aspects of planning concerns the temporal relationships between the key variables and the organizational inputs. These temporal relationships are important because the achievement of the key variables, within a specified period of time, depends on how well the organizational inputs are matched with these variables. Hence, identifying such temporal relationships becomes necessary. This paper describes the use of multivariate time series analysis in identifying temporal relationships in the planning of an education system. The implications of such an identification are also pointed out.