The first question to be answered in producing a management plan is 'What do you want from the site?'  On the face of it there are four types of objectives for woodland management depending whether the feature of conservation interest is the habitat, community, species or landscape.  It is unlikely that any one of these points of focus will totally dominate the management plan because they are all interrelated.  Nevertheless, priorities have to be set, usually according to the relative importance of different features in the national, and or, local contexts.

The relative importance of the various objectives determines the strategic setting of the management plan.  For any particular wood, incompatible objectives may be applied to different parts, and the compartmented site is managed with an integrated strategy.  On the oher hand, a regional set of woods that are representative of the same ecosystem may be managed under a combined or composite plan. The individual sites may have a different balance of objectives, but the composite plan for the suite ensures that the objectives, operational know how, and equipment are held in common and there is a common purpose to augment the combined resource by the addition or creation of new sites.

For each objective there are going to be constraints to achieving it. These constraints are termed factors and they can be either positive- favouring the target, or negative- preventing the target from being achieved. 

The ways in which the factors will be addressed to meet the objectives are termed prescriptions.  Each prescription will have one or more projects which specifies how a job has to be done in order to address deal with particular factor.  Projects also schedule the work according to season and year and specify how the outcomes are monitored according to agreed performance indicators.  A performance indicator is a measurable attribute of a feature that defines its proximity to its favourable condition.