Science Operation Centres (SOC) provide the technical support and expertise required to assist the community to plan and operate the payload on-board scientific spacecraft. P&S tools are components of the SOCs. They are essential in the search for increasing performance and productivity. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the environment in which P&S tools are running. It shows the SOC related ground segment areas where improvement can be done and identify some of the key requirements that must be considered while designing P&S tools. In particular, we show that the development of P&S tools should improve SOC performance by increasing their level of automation, functionality and standardisation. We particularly stress for the need for a quick and reliable way of updating the planning (process defining the spacecraft resource sharing) to commanding (process translating the planning data into command data) dictionary, if the direct access to the command data timeline is not granted to the PIs.This analysis is based on the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory practical experience of co-ordinating, for the European Space Agency, the payload operations of 3 missions: Cluster, Mars Express, Double Star (in collaboration with the Chinese Space Agency).