Imagine if you could multiply your organizational efforts to produce greater output with the same or reduced funding. Strategic planning can make this happen.
Why Should Government Do Strategic Planning?
Government is competing for citizen support and a talented workforce with often limited resources. If an agency does not have an operative strategic plan, the organization will have a difficult time accomplishing anything. Without a clear and direct plan, what is more likely to happen is that the agency will be operating on a day-to-day "putting out fires" basis. Since this mode of operation does not yield accomplishments, managers will have to scramble to find meaningful entries for year-end progress reports that point to dynamic growth within the organization.
The most important point is, however, that the agency will have missed the opportunities to make a difference because it did not have the focus that strategic planning can encourage. Strategic planning puts the organization's various groups on the same page by forcing the organization's focus and energy to be aimed in a single direction. This alignment amplifies the agency's efforts and enhances achieving goals.
Strategic planning is a necessity because government must:
- Manage a dynamic workload
- Meet changing stakeholder demands and expectations
- Make the best use of limited resources
- Conduct business in an open and transparent manner
- Move beyond today's firefighting to a more strategic focus
Agencies aspiring to excellence and accountability focus on a handful of clear goals and align the focus of every division, program and employee with those goals. Franklin Covey Co. and Harris Interactive conducted a study to test the gap between goal setting and actual achievement of goals in a sample of over 11,000 respondents. The survey results illustrate the planning challenges in organizations. Here's what the study found:
- Unclear goals: Only one in six workers think their organizations set clear goals, and fewer than half say they understand what their companies are trying to achieve.
- Wasted time on unimportant work: Respondents reported spending only 49 percent of their time on critical organizational goals. One hour out of three is spent on urgent but irrelevant tasks, such as checking e-mails. One hour in five is wasted dealing with pointless bureaucracy issues such as attending unproductive meetings.
- Lack of accountability: Only about 50 percent of all respondents said that they feel accountable for performance. Why? Because they are rarely, if ever, called on to report progress.
- No line of sight between organizational goals and individual-level contribution: Only 20 percent of people have clearly defined work goals, and only 10 percent clearly understand how their work relates to the organization's top-level goals.
By having a strategic plan that everyone buys into and understands, management can decrease the time spent on confusion and chaos, and increase the time spent on the crucial fruit-bearing pursuits of the organization.
How Does an Organization Do Strategic Planning?
Until the mid-1980s, the private sector mainly dealt with strategic planning. The public sector was unaccustomed to thinking about the business of government in terms of customers, stakeholders and situational analyses. Later, government began to use strategic planning to increase accountability. The result was an emphasis on internal concerns such as taxes, fees, funding and staffing levels, computer technology, abuse and waste. Citizen and consumer groups, as well as others, pressured government to run more like a business. The emphasis was on getting more and better results for the money spent.
Strategic planning can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Agencies must use a process that makes sense for their lines of business. Consequently, strategic planning should not be considered a one-size-fits-all proposition. Nevertheless, strategic planning is composed of common elements, as listed below:
- Mission , vision and values
- Organizational goals
- Strategies to accomplish the goals
- Action plans to implement the strategies
- Organizational alignment, such as budgeting and human resources
- Project management during implementation
- Periodic monitoring and reporting
The strategic planning process on this website integrates change management into the overall planning method. This is done to enhance the buy-in to the strategic plan among the organization's various work groups. The steps are listed on the next page.
Strategic Planning Process
What Is Strategic Planning Supposed to Solve/Resolve?
Government has long struggled with the citizens' perceptions that it is too bureaucratic, unresponsive to the taxpayer or user of its services, and wasteful of the resources it receives. Strategic planning creates an accountability framework that makes clear to the citizens what the agency is doing. Later, the agency comes back to report on what it has accomplished. If the agency has executed well, it can improve taxpayers' perceptions of the agency and of government in general. Subsequently, taxpayers will be more likely to support government programs seen to be accountable.
What Does a Good Strategic Plan Look Like?
There is no set format for a strategic plan. Although there is a large variety of models, the important criterion is that the model be workable for your particular business situation. Remember that a strategic plan must have goals that are:
- Specific enough so that those charged with carrying it out know what is to be done
- Measurable, in that all of the results can be measured to determine if the expectations were accomplished and to what level of completion or quality
- Attainable and actionable, meaning that the goals should require some observable action and the goals should be reachable
- Realistic, yet the goals should require some stretch to accomplish them
- Time bound, so that accomplishment is anchored within a time frame
These are basic requirements; yet many strategic plans read more like poetry than documents to shape the organization's future. Be careful to keep the strategic plan grounded in the real world so that managers will know what is supposed to happen and what they are supposed to do.
Summary
A strategic plan plants the seeds that lead to the harvest: the organization's goals. Strategic planning consists of answering important questions, one after another, to make the key decisions that will drive action and produce results. The answers to questions about your purpose, your current situation, your desired future, what needs to change, and how you will make change are the major components of a plan. The process includes not only the plan, but also taking action, checking to see if things are working out the way you intended in the plan, learning from experience and modifying your plan and actions until you have the results you want. Strategic planning does not have to be lengthy and complex, but it does have to help people gather good data, analyze logically, make tough decisions, and gain agreement and support for action and follow-through.
If government is to fulfill its promise, it must take responsibility for executing the organization's plans and achieving its goals. Acting upon its mandate, government must focus on those goals that improve the quality of life for its citizens.
