There is broad agreement among for profit and nonprofit leaders and experts that planning is a critical component of good management and governance. Planning helps assure that an organization remains relevant and responsive to the needs of its community, and contributes to organizational stability and growth. It provides a basis for monitoring progress, and for assessing results and impact. It facilitates new program development. It enables an organization to look into the future in an orderly and systematic way.
From a governance perspective, it enables the Board to set policies and goals to guide the organization, and provides a clear focus to CEO/Executive Director and staff for program implementation and business/agency management.
Benefits of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning serves a variety of purposes in organizations, including to:
- Clearly define the purpose of the organization and to establish realistic goals consistent with its mission and aligned with the organization’s capacity for implementation
- Communicate those goals and objectives to the organization’s stakeholders
- Develop a sense of ownership of the plan by the Board of Directors and staff
- Builds strong teams in the board and in the staff/employees
- Ensure the most effective use is made of the organization’s resources by focusing the resources on the key priorities
- Provide a base from which progress can be measured to establish a mechanism to measure outcomes to be used for program improvements
- Increases productivity from increased efficiency and effectiveness
- Solves major problems in the organization
We use the following framework in the Strategic Planning process:
1. Market/Community Analysis
This activity includes analysis of organization’s external environment (demographic, political, cultural & social, economic, legal, competitor’s and technical ).
2. Company/Agency Analysis
In this section, we analyze company mission, governance, operations and finances
3. Strength Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats Analysis (SWOT)
Based on the results of the conducted research we identify company/agency’s internal strengths, weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats
4. Setting Strategic Direction: Strategic Goals and Strategic initiatives for the next three years
We come to conclusions about what the organization must do as a result of the major issues and opportunities facing the organization. These conclusions include what overall accomplishments (or strategic goals) the organization should achieve, and the overall methods (or strategies) to achieve the accomplishments
5. Action Planning - Development of annual operational plan
Action planning is carefully laying out how the strategic goals will be accomplished. Action planning often includes specifying objectives, or specific results, with each strategic goal. Action planning also includes specifying responsibilities, timelines and budgets with each objective, or who needs to do what and by when.
6. Development of Outcome Measurement System
We help your organization to develop logic models for your processes/programs to be able to measure its outputs, intermediate outcomes, and longer-term outcomes. The main objective of the development of the outcome measurement system is to generate insights for continuous product/programs improvement.
