Editorial
“Begin the Begin”
Strategy development suffers when lack of attention is paid to details in the start-up phase. At this time is when important developments occur and decisions are made about the nature and scope of the planning process, who will be involved (and how) and securing facilitation and process management support for the organization. Based on our own “lessons learned” we respectfully submit a heaping scoop of common sense recommendations to help make a planning process get off on the right foot.
A. What are you looking to accomplish?
- Bring together your core “let’s get ready to plan” team to first discuss exactly what you want delivered. This includes:
- Is this is a strategic plan built from the ground up or updating an existing plan? Answering this question will help you target your energy and resources accordingly. Some of the elements of your current plan may be acknowledged as on target (mission and values) allowing environmental scanning and SWOT analysis work to gear towards retooling goals and objectives in alignment with a newly formed vision.
- Assess how much planning information you currently have that will have current value and gage its impact on the scope of new work for your planning team. This will be an important factor in estimating time and cost of your project.
- Discuss, define and draft the specific deliverables you are looking for. Provide a review and comment period for same with the executive management and leadership team for the organization.
- Keep the staff in the loop on developments of the developments. Move to make the process go from being abstract to real in the heads of everyone.
- Give enough lead time to gracefully develop / bring the planning process along. After all, you are planning for the future growth and development of your organization.
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B. What outside support do you want?
- Take the time to get to know the pool of potential contractors capable of providing expert guidance and support to your planning process. Here’s how:
- Provide an informational meeting well in advance of the RFP’s due date to allow prospective contractors to come and ask questions about what you are looking for. This gives you a good first look at them.
- Provide the questions you are going to select from / ask at the interview for each round of same…emphasis on the “each.” We recommend you go through two rounds of interviews reducing down from six to three, four to two or whatever works for you. Turn over many stones…you’ll be more secure and confident with your final choice. As for providing the questions to them in advance…it allows you to observe how well prepared applicants are, after all, isn’t this what you want when the project begins?
- Keep your RFP focused on exactly what you want delivered. An expansive over-reaching RFP gets what it asks for…a super vanilla response.
Would you like a spoon with that?