A strategic plan can help any operation get on track to achieve its goals. As a leader of a water system, you will sleep better at night knowing you and your team have a roadmap. Do you need to expand your plant to accommodate a growing population? Are you struggling to fund a major infrastructure improvement? Have you been trying to hire or keep good staff? Do you need to improve communications with your customers to prepare for drought or rate increases? Is retirement rapidly approaching and you need to prepare to pass the baton?
It’s rare, even impossible for an organization to overcome major obstacles or achieve significant change without a plan. The good news is that you can achieve any and all of these things by starting now to create your strategic plan.
The strategic planning process—from developing your vision and mission to establishing the activities needed over time to achieve set goals—supports your organization to determine what direction to go, and how to get there. Your team will better understand your concerns, start to visualize the solutions and build a road to success. You will have a living document to support decision-making and to help determine priorities from day to day.
Start by establishing (and/or reaffirming) your organization’s mission and vision to serve as shared understanding of who you are, what you do and what your larger ambition is. From there, develop and prioritize your goals using a Balanced Scorecard framework that looks at your system both internally and externally. The Scorecard approach assesses 1) who you serve (stakeholders), 2) how you fund your work (financial), 3) how you operate and manage your system (operations and management) and 4) whether or not you can hire and retain qualified staff (staffing & education). In a sense, a good strategic plan should test how your system is performing and help drive you towards effective improvements. All four elements of the scorecard depend on all the others to create an integrated plan for success. An example can be seen below. Finally, identify the milestones and timeframe of tasks needed to achieve the goals in the given timeframe. At The Capacity Collaborative, we use a tool called Backcasting for this last step.
Building a Strategic Plan doesn’t have to be a burden—it can be a fun and highly productive exercise that will help your organization achieve even its loftiest goals. You just have to start.
