Land Records Leadership Series: Strategic Planning
As we continue our Leadership Development Series, we move on to Strategic Planning. This author believes that strategic planning should be the foundation of any good program as it helps to keep projects relevant, on time, and budget. This author also struggles with strategic planning because many variables go into each item in the plan. Not to mention those emergency, unexpected and high value interruptions that can get in your way. In this edition, we hear from Larry Cutforth, Jeremiah Erickson, and Jon Schwitchenberg.
What preparation do you do before starting strategic planning?
Jon and Jeremiah both had similar ideas, which include looking back. (So, make sure you are documenting things for ALL of your projects along the way for future evaluation.) Jon states:
Strategic planning requires a lot of up-front work. 
- Documentation of past performance, initiatives and outcomes
- What fell short in the past and why
- What worked in the past and why
- Typically strategic planning involves a lot of stakeholder involvement (clients, board members, staff, public, system users and more), you need consensus on what they need and want.
- Business is very driven by technology - know what is out there, what could help you and where do you want to go
And Jeremiah “Look[s] at the successes and failures of the prior strategic plan. What worked, what didn’t, then re-prioritize what is left, and add to the list and re-rank it and also look at your neighbors’ or competitions' successful accomplishments and see if anything they did could be incorporated into your plans.”
Larry brings up an important point. “It is important to assess whether you and the organization have enough energy to perform strategic planning. Are key participants ready to commit the time needed?” One could argue that by having a good strategic plan in place, it would be easier to concentrate limited energy on what needs to be focused on. But how does one prepare for future fires when there are so many we are trying to put out right now? Perhaps that’s a topic for another day.
What is your process for setting long term goals and ensuring they align with your organization's needs?
Jon describes a process that goes from needs to mission and vision to attainable goals, where one process feeds into another. “Taking all of the needs assessment/planning data, you then define your mission and vision. Mission/vision then leads to goal setting. Goals have to be attainable. Once goals are set you determine action items to achieve the goals - action items need to be explicit and detailed, as well as have a timeline and ways to be measured. The worst strategic plans are those that are pie in the sky, not having detailed action plans. The actions also need to have costs and buy-in from the organization otherwise they will fail most likely.” And Larry states that “Agency and higher-level organization goals should be identified early in the process. Discuss long-term goals with higher-level management to ensure alignment.”
How do you measure if your strategic plan is successful?
Monitoring (and revising) the strategic plan is essential for a successful outcome. Larry “set[s] and monitor[s] key performance indicators.” Jon looks beyond the dollars involved into more intangibles like client satisfaction and growth. “Having measurable goals/action items that you monitor. As stated above, the actions need to have costs and timelines. Measure the actions based on these two elements. Once in place, have a way in place to measure the effectiveness of the action. This could be dollars, performance, client satisfaction, growth and more. So measure the implementation but also measure the longer term effects.”
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