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MRSC has joined with Toni Nelson, Small Cities Specialist, State Auditor's Office, Gayla Gjertsen, Finance Director, City of Tumwater, and Mike Bailey, Finance Director, City of Redmond, to bring you the "Finance Advisor" column. The "Finance Advisor" will feature a new article each month with timely local government finance information and advice you can use.*
Strategic Planning
May 2007
Gayla Gjertsen, Finance Director, City of Tumwater
Why Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning puts the city in command of its own destiny. It opens up alternative courses of action. It generates greater flexibility to deal with present and future problems. And it brings the city council and city management together in a team effort that strengthens the policy and decision-making process.
What is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is a broad, thoughtful exercise that focuses on the long-term existence of an organization. A city, under any normal circumstance, is bound to experience changes in citizens-needs and wants, financial abilities, and regulations, whether from state or federal government, to name a few. Strategic planning tracks these key factors. Strategic planning is a systematic identification of external opportunities and threats that a city will face, and a systematic identification of strengths and weaknesses inside the city operations. Traditionally, strategic planning is a window of five to six years.
Decisions
Strategic planning involves making a series of decisions now to ensure a positive future. These decisions as based on critical facts that deal with three major areas in a city:
- services and service levels
- financial resources
- organizational and human services
These major areas and decisions made in these areas help you to design a desired future for the city by developing the strategies to bring this future into reality.
Continuous Processes
Cities that have held strategic planning sessions did so once a year and then went about their business. That is no longer possible. Today, the planning process must be a continuous one involving constant review and evaluation of the results. Participation by all levels of staff is essential with communication moving up, down and across organizational lines.
Successful strategic planning has to become an integral part of the function of each level of management and each department within the city, as well as the responsibility of the legislative body (council) and the management of the city. Because the external world is changing so dramatically, councilmembers and city management must keep on eye constantly on the environment and respond accordingly to its changes in course.
Preplanning
A great deal of time is spent in preplanning. It is within this phase that the council has its greatest impact on the quality of the strategic plan. A councilmember must be a strategic thinker. Constantly receiving input from citizens and the city management about the city’s operations.
For a strategic plan to be effective, knowledge and experience has to be brought to the table. A strategic thinker is a pioneer, continually exploring an unknown future and the city’s place in it.
Misconceptions about Strategic Planning
Most cities don't do strategic planning because they don’t understand the proper role and importance of such planning in the organization. The most common reasons given are:
- We can’t plan for tomorrow, how do we know what is going to happen?
- We don’t have time to plan like this and we can’t make the time or we won’t have the time to do anything else.
- We have already done all the planning for land use; development and environmental uses; why do we need to do this?
You can think of strategic planning as the umbrella over all the other planning documents, while including the operations side of the city’s activities and bringing them all together. A strategic plan is an action oriented process that enables you to establish objectives and goals. It quickens the development of financial strategies to achieve the city’s vision.
The purpose of strategic planning is to evaluate where you’ve been, understand where you are, and plan where you want to go. The plan focuses on long-term rather than the short-term, which is where your annual budget plays a role.
Preplanning
Preplanning is the first phase of the strategic planning process and is one of the most important that most trying to do strategic planning miss. It is the “plan to plan” phase. It involves information gathering by management in these main areas:
- the city’s internal or external changes
- the city’s opportunities or threats
- identifying the city’s strengths and weaknesses
Assistance
If this is something you are considering, don’t try to re-invent the wheel. Look at what some of your peers have been doing on the Government Finance Officers “Budget Practices” Web page.
Gayla L. Gjertsen has been the Finance Director for the City of Tumwater for over 15 years and was previously the Director of Administration for the City of Milton for13 years. She has also served as president of the Washington Finance Officer’s Association. Gayla has been a presenter at the annual Budget and Fiscal Management Workshops held each summer for many years, and periodically conducts other workshops and writes about local government finance issues.
*The Articles appearing in the "Finance Advisor" column represent the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Municipal Research & Services Center.