Hi, I'm Jami Yazdani. Welcome to our Impactful Projects and Planning microtraining Series. In this session, we will talk about strategies for successfully implementing your strategic goals for going from strategic plan to action plan. Please engage with me in the comments or reach out to me directly with any questions. So you may be thinking, aren't our strategic plans already action plans? I would say that most strategic plans are a good start on an action plan but lack the specificity necessary to direct action. Most strategic plan goals are broad and vague. And while they may be pointing us in the right direction and towards our priorities they don't tell us how we will get there. This is partly because many strategic planning processes end with the final draft of the plan. How the plan is operationalized and implemented is at worst, an afterthought, or more often left to the managers to decide whether to implement it for their own departments or divisions. No wonder these plans fail to make an impact and often end up primarily forgotten, vanishing until the next planning process begins. An impactful strategic planning process goes beyond the final draft and includes implementation and assessment. When implementation is a key part of our planning process, we are able to take our plan and turn it into an action plan by developing and sharing measurable and specific objectives for achieving our plan's goals. Then we can truly assess our plan as we periodically review our progress towards our goals and objectives. Implementation and assessment can help us align activities throughout the organization with our goals and priorities. Making implementation planning and assessment part of the strategic planning process also encourages us to continue to engage and involve our stakeholders as we determine next steps and share progress towards achieving our goals and objectives. When your community and staff are engaged throughout the strategic planning process, they feel more bought into the plan's goals. And when we turn those bigger-picture strategic goals and priorities into actions that our staff can implement, and our users can see come alive throughout the plan's timeline, we actually create more planned flexibility and resilience because we are developing action plans for the moment using shorter-term goals and objectives. This transparent approach that focuses on actionable implementation can create real change throughout our organization, building a culture of shared responsibility and accountability for achieving our plan's goals. So how do we go from strategic plan to action plan? We can turn our strategic plans into something actionable by infusing plan goals and priorities throughout every level of our organization. That's the purpose of the implementation phase. And it's also something we can act on now. Even if we didn't initially include it in our strategic planning process. So what specific strategies can we use? Today, there are three strategies I'll share that an organization can execute on whether they just finished drafting a plan or they've had an existing plan for a while. Before I talk about creating organizational implementation objectives, I do want to draw a distinction between goals and objectives. While the terms goal and objective are often used interchangeably, and there are good arguments for defining them differently than I have here, I'm going to be talking about them this way: A goal is a desired result while an objective is a specific and measurable action to achieve a goal.

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Our goals tend to be broader and longer-term and are often the core of our strategic plan, reflecting our priorities, while objectives are more narrow and shorter-term so they become the core of our action plans. Our goals may be bigger-picture and more aspirational. But our objectives should be clear and actionable. Their flexibility comes from their shorter-term timelines - we can meet the needs of the moment and outline what we are currently able to do to achieve a strategic goal using shorter-term objectives. Okay, so our first strategy is to create organizational implementation objectives. Essentially, we create an action plan for how we are going to achieve our strategic plan's goals by creating periodic shorter-term objectives for each of our bigger-picture strategic planning goals. So what does this mean? It means that for every strategic planning goal, we want to develop implementation objectives that detail what we will be doing to achieve that goal. To figure out these objectives we can ask ourselves, how will we achieve this goal what actions or steps will we need to take? What outcomes will we need to create or deliver? So if we have a three-year strategic plan for each of our plan's goals, we can create periodic objectives based on a time period. We might say that this is what we are going to achieve in the first year to support the school and then here is what we are going to achieve in the second year and so on. Or we could create objectives that are steps rather than based on a timeline. We are going to achieve A and then B in support of this goal. Or we could use some combination of the two. It really depends on the actions you need to take as an organization to achieve a particular goal. We can develop these implementation objectives as soon as we've drafted our plan, or we can develop and share them more periodically like annually or quarterly, or whatever makes the most sense for your organization. Regardless of when you set your implementation objectives because they cover a shorter term, they can be revised more frequently than our strategic goals, allowing for adjustments as circumstances and needs change. The shorter-term implementation objectives also make it easier to show and share progress towards our longer-term bigger-picture strategic goals. So let's move on to our next strategy to develop departmental or team plans. Our organizational implementation objectives reflect what we are doing across the organization. While each objective may be owned by a particular department, division, or team because they will be acting on that objective, we still want to create departmental goals and objectives that support our strategic plan. There are a couple of ways to approach this. One way is to take our organizational strategic planning goals and speak directly to those goals and our departmental plans. So as a department, we can consider how we will support this goal of supporting employee development efforts. Perhaps we created a departmental objective of implementing a formal professional development request process for our department staff. So as a department we build our actionable objectives directly on the organization's goals. If the organization has developed periodic implementation objectives, we can also build on those as a department or division. If our organization had a goal of supporting employee development and an implementation objective of delivering a leadership training program. Perhaps we are the department designing that program. So designing that training program becomes a departmental objective. If we aren't the department that owns this organizational objective, perhaps we want to send 50% of our supervisory staff to the program. Here we are breaking each organizational objective into further action for our department by creating department objectives.

Instead, we may decide to create our own departmental plans with our own goals, but tie our goals and objectives directly to our organizational strategic plan. So we may have a department plan with a goal of supporting the skills development of our team, and we may create a specific objective to deliver a particular program relevant to that skills development. And we explicitly tie that departmental goal and objective to our organizational goal of supporting employee development. Our purpose is to align our departmental plan with its goals and objectives, and our organizational strategic goals. And finally, we can incorporate our strategic goals into our project proposals. If you use a more formal process for deciding to move forward with a new project, you can include a prompt asking how this project supports or furthers your strategic goals and objectives. You could also add this type of prompt to your Project Request Form or an evaluation rubric to make alignment part of your decision-making. A great many projects come out of more informal discussions, say at a staff meeting or among teams. We can still create that culture of shared accountability for plan goals and objectives by making it a practice to discuss whether a project aligns with our strategic goals. By modeling thinking about the connection to our strategic goals, we can hopefully get our teams to think more strategically when they are considering and presenting new ideas and activities. So that's a very quick introduction to some strategies for turning your strategic plan into an action plan. If you want more information on impactful planning, download our Impactful Strategic Planning Guide. Our free guide to strategic planning that results in actionable implementable goals is available at guides.yazdaniconsulting.com. If you want more ideas or support for strategic and implementation planning, visit our impactful planning page at yazdaniconsulting.com/impactfulplanning to register for our Impactful Strategic Planning course, or schedule a consulting session. I'm always happy to take any questions that you have. Feel free to reach out. Thanks for participating in our Impactful Projects and Planning microtraining series. Visit yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp to view all the sessions in the series and learn about upcoming microtrainings. Thank you.