Streamline Your Strategic Planning Process
Traditional, comprehensive strategic planning processes can be time and resource-intensive. These familiar processes may involve organizational assessments, focus groups, surveys, interviews, and listening sessions to inform planning, along with facilitated sessions to get to a vision, mission, goals, and objectives. They may also include additional work to translate plan objectives into an implementation plan.
While many comprehensive processes are highly collaborative and inclusive and usually lead to useful and inspiring plans, they aren’t always the best fit for every organization or every planning need.
If your organization isn’t in a position to support a comprehensive strategic planning process, you may want to streamline your strategic planning process.
When Streamlining Makes Sense
Streamlining your strategic planning process may be a better choice than more complex and comprehensive processes when:
Your organization is in transition: During times of transition, such as when your executive director is about to retire, you have interim leadership or a lot of new staff, it may not make sense to commit to a more comprehensive, long-term planning process.
Your existing plan needs “rescuing”: If your plan is outdated or irrelevant, and its goals no longer reflect the realities of your community's needs, you need to take action quickly to set a new direction.
You don’t have time for a longer process: If you need a new plan right away to satisfy a requirement for funding or a partnership or to get your organization moving in a different direction due to rapid changes in your environment, a more traditional process may take too much time.
You lack resources: Whether it's funding, people, or bandwidth, you may not be able to tackle a more comprehensive process.
You have a very small team: A more complex process with several activities and facilitated sessions may be overkill for organizations with very small teams or just a few stakeholders.
How to Streamline Your Strategic Planning Process
Streamlining your strategic planning process can help your organization develop an actionable, impactful plan without committing the time and resources required by more complex and comprehensive processes.
When streamlining your strategic planning process:
Focus on strategic priorities: Instead of developing five or ten strategic goals, each with several objectives, focus on developing two to four strategic priorities. While goals and objectives are very specific and usually articulate an outcome, strategic priorities are more general and flexible, representing the critical high-level categories or areas your organization wants to focus on over the planning timeline. Examples of strategic priorities include “Expand Programming,” “Financial stability, “ Donor management,” and “Modernize operations.”
Gather meaningful feedback: Comprehensive strategic planning processes are often an opportunity to gather lots of different information about our environment and users. To streamline this process, organizations can focus on simple activities that target the types of feedback that will be most useful in developing our priorities and actions. To help determine strategic priorities, organizations can conduct short surveys with a few simple questions or gather stories online or at events about key organizational impacts or needed improvements from users, board members, and volunteers. Our draft strategic priorities can be also shared with key stakeholders to gauge reactions before finalizing.
Create a short-term implementation plan: Building on your strategic priorities, work with your leadership, staff, and teams to develop a short-term implementation plan. Identify actions your organization can take to make progress on each of your strategic priorities, prioritizing these actions and setting clear accountability and deadlines. A one-year implementation plan works well for most organizations, but you could also create a three or six- month plan.
Monitor progress and adjust as necessary: Monitor progress on your priorities and implementation plan regularly, adjusting as necessary. At the end of your implementation planning timeline, assess your plan’s progress. Then, create a new implementation plan or revise your priorities before implementation planning.
By focusing on strategic priorities, gathering meaningful feedback, creating a short-term implementation plan, and monitoring progress regularly, your organization can streamline its strategic planning process to fit your organization’s needs.
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