How To Design And Implement A Strategic Plan

Posted: March 2, 2015 by Sam Grimshaw

Myra Khan shares her top tips on how to design and implement a strategic plan.

Be clear of what you want to achieve, then work out how you will achieve it. But is it that easy?

The plan
Many elements of strategic planning are the same across the board, but there is no single formula.

Planning can take three weeks or three months, depending on the size, scale and longevity of organisations.
But before the planning, do a reality-check, get feedback and meet stakeholders and beneficiaries in your target communities. Also, make the staff do field visits to help them connect with the cause.
So who should be involved in the strategic planning process? Usually a director or manager from each functional area of your organisation is needed to consider all aspects of work. Managers should brief their teams about the results of planning, inform them about structural changes and be open to feedback.

Key areas
During the process, a few things you should decide on are:

Your vision: What is it that you want to achieve?

The problem: What does your organisation believe the problem is that it is trying to tackle? What are its root causes?

Once your problem and its root causes are defined, decide how you can claim your organisation is changing that.

Core Values: They will form the culture of your staff. Respect, humility, solution-focused – whatever values you feel are crucial for your organisation to flourish should be clarified.

Short-term goals: Arguably the hardest part of strategic planning is creating shorter term goals and visions for next three or five years. What are your target numbers of beneficiaries for the next three years? Short-term goals help prioritise and keep you away from creating over ambitious workplans for staff that won’t be met, and won’t realistically contribute to your long-term vision.

Put plan into action
Many organisations create a strategic plan, but fail to execute it. Setting goals for your teams are worthless without actually holding yourselves accountable to them. Based on the strategic plan and your three-year goals and vision – chart out yearly plans for your organisation. Ideally, team-heads should create their department’s own plans. From this, they can create monthly workplans for themselves, and depending on whether management sees fit – attach monthly targets to these as well.

A few points to keep in mind

• Human resources and monitoring teams will be crucial during the process. HR for ensuring maximum staff investment creates avenues for the best ideas, your monitoring team for making sure goals and targets will be visible in the future and can be tracked.
• Prioritising where the focus needs to be over the next three years is key to ensuring you aren’t jumping the gun leading to a failed intervention. Ask yourselves what needs to be done now. Don’t try and tackle too many problems at the same time.
• Strategic planning also gives an opportunity to make key organisational decisions in line with your purpose. What big debates are currently taking place that affect your programme? Are you looking to raise field staff salaries? Should you be targeting a more diverse range of communities?
• Something that is key but often less emphasised is learning. You planned timelines, calculated risks, set targets, but it still went wrong. Why? With a strategic plan and a regularly updated programme monitoring framework, it becomes easier to track and identify what the problem was – and what to not do next time.

Read the full article here.