Learn when and how to streamline your strategic planning process.

Hello, and welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we'll talk about when and how to streamline your strategic planning process. So first, what do I mean by streamlining our strategic planning process, the comprehensive strategic planning processes that most folks are used to tend to involve a lot of activities and steps. So significant time is spent on data gathering and analysis, things like environment assessments, focus groups, surveys, interviews, and listening sessions, then, there may be multiple facilitated sessions to get to a vision, mission and values, then more sessions and activities to put to get to a plan that's going to have goals and objectives. And finally, there may be additional work to translate those objectives into an implementation plan. And so these processes often take four or five, six months to a year. So by streamlining, I mean, removing some of those activities getting us down to a couple of key steps. Now, why would we want to streamline there are a couple of reasons, I often see that nonprofits and other mission driven organizations might want a shorter, simpler strategic planning process. A really common reason is that your organization is in transition. And it just doesn't make sense to commit to a more comprehensive, long term planning proc process at this time. So perhaps your executive director is about to retire, or you have interim leadership, or a lot of new staff, you may not want to do a more comprehensive process during these times of transition. Another reason is that your existing plan needs some rescuing. And so maybe it's outdated, maybe it's irrelevant. Maybe your plans, goals, no longer reflect the realities of your community's needs. And you need to take action now, to set a new direction. Another reason may be that you don't have time for a lengthier process. So maybe you need a new plan right away to satisfy a requirement for funding or for a partnership, or to get your organization moving in a different direction very quickly. And a more traditional process is just going to take more time than you can give. Or you simply don't have the resources. So whether it's funding or people or bandwidth, you are not able to tackle a more comprehensive process. I've also found that a streamlined process can work really well for organizations with very, very small teams. And so that's why folks might want to streamline a process. But how do we do that? And so, you know, how do we get to an actionable, impactful plan without all of these great activities that we find in more traditional comprehensive processes? So if we're removing steps and activities, what should we be focusing on? So I have three recommendations to share that you can think about if you're trying to streamline your process. And so one of the first is that we can streamline the process by focusing on strategic priorities, so determining what our strategic priorities are. So instead of working toward developing five or 10 strategic goals, each with several objectives underneath them. Our purpose here is just to come away with two three or four strategic priorities. And so strategic priorities are just short 234 word phrases, representing the critical high level areas or initiatives your organization wants to work on over the planning timeline. And so examples could be things like expand programming, increased financial stability, increased fundraising, improved donor management, create partnerships, modernize operations. So how do we determine these priorities? There are a couple of ways that you can approach this. We can scan our environment. So what are the challenges we are facing or trends we need to adapt to? Have there been shifts and changes that we're seeing or want to make? As an organization, and so we could do some kind of SWOT or soar exercise with our board or our staff, we could look at minutes from recent board meetings or staff meetings to really understand the topics or concerns that keep coming up again, and again, these may point to our priorities. Well, this plan, we also can look to our existing plan and building on that existing plan. And so while the current plan we have or an existing plan, if we do have one might not be completely irrelevant, it might not be achievable, it still may point us toward our strategic priorities so we can review our existing plan, think about what we have accomplished, what we haven't accomplished, kind of what's changed since we wrote that plan, are there any shifts or changes, and that could help us determine our strategic priorities. We can also gather feedback. And so you know, what do our leadership our board our staff, our users think should be our top priorities. Because gathering feedback is often what takes so much time and energy. During planning. We'll talk more about feedback and some ways to streamline that and a few minutes. But ideally, one or all of these approaches will get us to a few strategic priorities. Now what. So the next step then is to create a short term implementation plan. And so we work with our leadership, our staff and our teams to develop this plan. I usually recommend that folks work on a one year implementation plan. But you could also do something shorter three months or six months. And so to develop our implemented implementation plan, we are going to look at specific actions we want to take over the next year or whatever our timeline is to support our priorities. And so let's say we've identified these three strategic priorities for our organization, we're going to focus on improving employee retention, expanding programs for some key user group. And we're going to modernize our online platforms. So we can determine the actions we want to take to help us make progress over the next year on each of these priorities. And so I've listed some examples here, I've got two listed for each priority. But you may end up with many more actions in this or only only one or two. And so what I have found when doing this type of work with clients, is that by distilling things down to a few simply stated priorities, narrowing the timeline to a year or less, and asking our staff and teams to think about actions, we usually end up with a lot of things that we can do to support each of our priorities and move our organization forward. Now, we do want our actions to be concrete, and achievable. And so for each action, we would want to set a due date, name, who's responsible or accountable, whether that's a department or a team or an individual individual, we could also include, you know, a key metric or measure of success. Like, you know, the employee survey should get 80% staff participation, or we intend to deliver two sessions of of a training. And so this would get us to that implementation plan. So we've got strategic priorities and an implementation plan for the year that we can act on what happens next and a streamlined process. So at the end of that year, you could assess your progress and either create a new implementation plan for the next year, or go back and look at your priorities and revise those before creating a new plan. And so you may at this point, decide that the streamline process and that one year action plan has got your organization through the transition, the time of growth, the time of constrained resources, and you may decide that you're ready for a more comprehensive planning process. So great. So that's some ways that we can really streamline but what about that feedback and engagement, right? Where does that really factor in? And so even with a streamline process, I do recommend gathering some stakeholder feedback. And so what we want to do though, to save some time is to focus our attention on feedback that is really going to be most meaningful in determining our priorities and actions, and a lot of more comprehensive processes, we're using that as an opportunity to gather lots of other types of information about our environment about our users. But here, we're really just focusing it on the things that are going to help us create those priorities and actions. And so one of the things that we can do is a very short survey. And so instead of lengthy surveys, you could ask a couple of questions that are going to help you determine your strategic priorities. But you could also if you have a draft of your priorities, share those with some key stakeholders, like board members to see what they think about your priorities. And so we really can just use a few questions to help us determine whether these you know, our draft priorities are the right priorities, you can also gather stories. And this can be used to inform priorities or actions, or to gauge reactions to a draft plan. So you can gather stories from users or board members or volunteers or reactions, via social media on a form or at events. One of our previous sessions was on engaging with stories. And so you may want to check out that session for some additional ideas there. You could also hold a session with your staff or teams to help you create your implementation plan and determine actions. And so these are some of the ways that we can gather feedback, they're pretty simple. Which also means that we can analyze the results we get quicker. And you know, kind of have a process that makes it a little more easier to get what we want to learn out of these feedback mechanisms. And so what I've also found is that these simple approaches can really still be ways that we're engaging our community, particularly things like gathering stories can be really fun. When we're working with our leadership and our staff and our teams and these actions sessions. We can really get folks excited about our plan and the direction that our organization is moving. And so Okay, those were a few strategies for streamlining your strategic planning process. You want to focus on determining your strategic priorities rather than objectives and goals. You want to create an actionable implementation plan, and you do want to include some meaningful and simple opportunities for feedback and engagement. So before I take any questions, I thought you might be interested in downloading our impactful strategic planning template and worksheet. This free resource can be used to develop actionable implementation objectives for your broader plan goals or priorities and is available at Yazdaniconsulting.com. Resources. If you do need hands on support, leading planning or want to learn more about our done for you streamline strategic planning services, visit our planning solutions page at Yazdaniconsulting.com. Planning. Great. So I am happy to take any questions that you might have, please feel free to add those in the comments. I'll give folks a few moments to go ahead and add their questions. There's, there's always a bit of a delay. And if I'm not able to answer your question, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. And you can find all of the ways to contact me at Yazdaniconsulting.com. Contact. So do please reach out if you'd like to talk more about planning. Okay, so a question is, do you think the traditional planning process is obsolete? And so simple answer there is I don't, I'm very lucky to work with other consultants who are very, very good at leading organizations through comprehensive processes. And I've seen firsthand the value that those processes have. And so I'm not suggesting that we give up those types of processes. But I also think they're not a good fit for every organization or every situation. And so what I sometimes see is that organizations, you know, in transition, who don't have enough resources, have some other things going on, that aren't able to do a comprehensive process just kind of give up on doing planning at all. And I think that's a mistake. And so I think a small streamlined process can really help those organizations move their, their organization forward and get to a plan they can act on that really meets their needs. So another question is how is a strategic priority different than a strategic goal. And so a strategic goal usually states an outcome, while a priority is really kind of a category or an area, it's much more general. And so we might have a priority. That's emplou, improve employee retention. If we had a strategic goal, it would probably say a Give, give more information about how we're going to do that. And so maybe it would be implement hybrid work options to improve improve employee retention. And so priorities are much more general goals and objectives should be much more, much more specific. And so now obviously, if we have a strategic priority, it's pretty general, once we get to action planning, we might get to what might be more like an objective like, you know, implement a hybrid work solution. But we're also going to have a lot of other actions. Um, some of them may be big like that, and some of them may be very, very small. And so I would say that's kind of the primary difference. So hope that that makes sense. All right, great. So do feel free to comment, or reach out to me with any additional questions. So thank you for participating in our impactful projects and Planning series. Visit Yazdaniconsulting.com IPP to view all of the sessions in the series and learn about upcoming sessions. Thank you