Creating Your Strategic Plan

A Workbook for Public and Nonprofit Organizations

John M. Bryson, Farnum K. Alston

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780470405352
• eBook ISBN: 9781118067277
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Creating and Implementing Your Strategic Plan is the companion workbook to Bryson's landmark book, Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, a step-by-step guide to putting strategic planning into effect. Using revised, easy-to-understand worksheets, the authors provide clear instructions for creating a strategic plan tailored to the needs of the individual organization. With more material on stakeholder analysis, visioning, strategic issue identification, and implementation, this new edition is the best resource for taking leaders, managers, and students through every step of the strategic planning process.

Part 1
An Overview

Introduction

What Is Strategic Planning and Why Do It?

Several Complementary Ways of Looking at and Thinking About Strategic Planning

The Benefits of Strategic Planning

Poor Excuses for Avoiding Strategic Planning

Two Legitimate Reasons Not to Undertake Strategic Planning

What Is Strategic Planning and Why Do It?

Strategic planning is “a deliberative, disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization (or other entity) is, what it does, and why it does it” (Bryson, 2011). Strategic planning is an approach to dealing with the serious challenges that organizations, parts of organizations, collaborations, and communities face. These challenges require deliberation and discipline on the part of leaders if they are to be effectively managed.

All organizations are in a constant state of change and flux—even those that think of themselves as stable are typically changing in various ways. People are coming and going, mandates are shifting, budgets are changing, stakeholder needs and expectations are changing, and so on. A strategically managed organization is one that both defines where it wants to be and manages change effectively through an action agenda to achieve that future.

• Strategic planning is a way of thinking, acting, and learning.
• It usually takes a comprehensive view by focusing on the big picture, but it also leads to specific, targeted actions in the present in light of their longer-term consequences.
• It is often visionary and usually proactive rather than reactive in addressing the need for change.
• It is flexible and practical.
• It is a guide for decision making and resource allocation; strategic planning guides budgeting, not the reverse.

Strategic planning is not any one thing but is instead a set of concepts, procedures, methodologies, and tools that can help public and nonprofit organizations, collaborations, and communities to become more successful in defining and achieving their mission or vision and in creating significant and enduring public value.

Through strategic planning organizations can

• Document and discuss the environment in which they exist and operate, and explore the factors and trends that affect the way they do business and carry out their roles.
• Clarify and frame the issues or challenges facing the organization.
• Clarify organizational mission, goals, and values, and articulate a vision for where the organization wants to be.
• Develop strategies to meet their mandates, fulfill their missions, achieve their goals, be true to their values, realize their visions, and create public value by reexamining and reworking organizational mandates, mission, values, goals, product or service level and mix, clients, users or payers, cost, financing, structure, processes, or management.

To be effective, strategic planning must be action and results oriented and must be linked to operational planning. It must also be linked to a variety of functional types of planning—information technology, human resource, financing, business plans, and so forth. And planning of all types must be done with implementation in mind and the implementation process itself must be effectively managed; otherwise, hopes and dreams will amount to little more than idle fantasy.

Several Complementary Ways of Looking at and Thinking About Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a process that typically results in a plan—and the process itself needs to be thought about strategically and often planned as well. Indeed, the process can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors
• Part 1: An Overview
• Part 2: Creating and Implementing Strategic Planning
• Resources
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT