Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to this brief overview of strategic planning in public health. In the next few minutes, we will cover a definition of strategic planning, talk about why strategic planning is important, and when to create your strategic plan, look at ten common steps of strategic planning, review an example from the field, have a quick quiz, and end with additional resources. What is strategic planning? Strategic planning is a process for defining and determining an organization's roles, priorities, and direction over three to five years. A strategic plan sets forth what an organization plans to achieve, how it will achieve it, and how it will know if it has achieved it. This definition comes from the Public Health Accreditation Board's Standards and Measures, Version 1.5, Standard 5.3. We are using this definition because one benefit of having a strategic plan is meeting requirements of public health accreditation. Why have a strategic plan? Beyond meeting a key requirement of public health accreditation, when you have a strategic plan, you've put information about the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats into a single context. Your plan is a unified picture of your organization, including environmental context, mission, vision, values, goals, specific plans, and measures of success. Your plan's priorities drive the whole performance management system. Those priorities also guide specific decisions about allocating resources, and it connects the agency's direction to the community health assessment and the community health improvement plan. In the slides to come, I will say a bit more about each step. Here they all are at once. Scan your internal and external environments. Either set or review your organizational direction, composed of your vision, mission, and values. Choose strategic goals, objectives, and strategies. Create performance measures. Build action plans. Allocate your resources. Communicate and implement the plan. Track your progress. Modify your plan based on data. And evaluate your strategic planning process to improve it the next time around. Step 1, Environmental Scan. The following five areas are crucial to your environmental scan. Market forces. Stakeholder analysis. Technology. Internal capability analysis. Legal and regulatory factors. A useful way to analyze these areas is a SWOT analysis. And here is the SWOT format. Use the quadrants to build information for each topic area to include in your plan. In each quadrant, ask questions like these. Under Strength, ask, In the here and now, what are our advantages? What is working well? Under Weakness, ask, In the here and now, what could be improved? What should be avoided? Under Opportunity, ask, In the future, are there ways to capitalize on our strengths? Useful opportunities can come from such things as changes in technology and markets. Changes in government policy. Changes in social patterns, population profiles, or lifestyles. Or local issues. Under Threats, ask, In the future, are there barriers to responding to an event the next time? What obstacles do we face? Has our role or responsibility changed? Here is Step 2. During this step, you set direction. Your mission, vision, and values focus the energies and resources of your entire organization. They also serve as checkpoints to return to whenever you might feel yourself going off course. Your mission is your purpose statement. Your vision describes how the organization wants to be perceived in the future, what success looks like. The vision challenges everyone to reach for something significant and evokes an inspiring future. Your values provide an underlying framework for making decisions. They are part of the organization's culture. Values are often rooted in ethical themes, such as honesty, trust, integrity, respect, or fairness. Values should be applicable across the entire organization. At Step 3, we work on goals, objectives, and strategies. First, I'll point out that these terms vary. A strategic goal in one plan might be called a strategic direction in another. A strategy in one place might be called a tactic somewhere else. We've tried to stick with the terms used by the Public Health Accreditation Board, but your terms are just fine as long as you can describe how your strategic plan meets requirements. Your goals are broad statements describing a future condition or achievement. Goals focus on outcomes or results and are qualitative in nature. Goals are about where we want to be. Goals should be realistic and achievable. Your objectives support the goals and will be specific statements of a desired short or shorter term condition or achievement that includes a measurable end result to be accomplished by a specific time, by specific teams or individuals. Objectives answer the question, what do we have to do to get there? Strategies are steps you will take to achieve your objectives. Step 4 is developing good measures. Reliability, accuracy, and timeliness are the key characteristics of good performance measures. Reliable means consistent from one reporting cycle to another. Accurate means the data is correct. And timely means it is available when needed and can be reported in a time frame that makes it usable. This set of tutorials includes another segment on the topic of performance measures that goes into more depth. Step 5 is developing action plans. One action plan is needed for each strategy. Each plan contains descriptions of who will do what and when. Steps are specific enough to assign and give due dates. Once you have your performance measures and action plans, you need to allocate resources. The key to allocating resources is being realistic. If an activity will take 80 hours, do not overestimate the human resources you have available to do the job. On the flip side, try not to underestimate your available resources and lose valuable momentum. Finding this balance can truly be a difficult step for leadership teams. Here we are at Step 7. You can use the first four bullets as the basic elements of a communication plan. You will probably have several different audiences. List them and what they are interested in regarding your plan. Decide what communication methods you'll use to inform them. Develop your timelines and messages. And get started communicating. Now it's time to implement your strategic plan. Once you have begun to carry out your plan, you will want to know if activities are being implemented and whether you are heading in the right direction. Measures provide evidence of what reality is. Set up a regular review cycle and let everyone know well in advance of the coming topics. Analyze using graphs for rapid communication. Recognize and reward good results. And take action to help improve poor performance. At Step 9, we modify action plans based on data. Planning is dynamic. Your strategic plan is a living document, so stay flexible to changing circumstances. The key idea here is based on data. When making changes, be sure they directly relate to what the data is telling you as you track your progress. In addition to appropriate data-driven changes to your action plan, changing measures might be a good idea as well. As a program's lifecycle matures, measures will expand from inputs to outputs to outcomes. At this point, you can step back to evaluate your process for strategic planning. You might find areas that need improvement for next time. Look for lessons learned. Give your participants and employees a chance to debrief. For accreditation, take this opportunity to double-check that required documents are in order. No drafts still lingering, documents have logos and dates, and you have meeting attendance records. The Kent County Health Department's strategic plan is one of several examples of high-quality local strategic plans featured on the National Association of City and County Health Officials website. You can find it and other examples at the link to the NACCHO website on the resources slide in this presentation. Now for our quick quiz. Which of the following is not a potential part of an environmental scan? Stakeholder analysis, market forces analysis, technology analysis, internal capability analysis, value stream mapping, legal and regulatory factors analysis. If you chose E, value stream mapping, you are right. Excellent. Value stream mapping is a detailed approach to process analysis and improvement and not part of strategic planning. Here are some excellent resources for creating and using your strategic plan, as well as a list of other related topics covered in this series. We look forward to hearing from you if you would like further technical assistance on this or other performance management topics. This presentation is part of a performance management in public health training series presented by Washington's Public Health Centers for Excellence and funded by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The centers are located in the Spokane Regional Health District and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. Our goals are to help local health jurisdictions and tribal agencies improve their results, prepare to meet public health standards, and achieve accreditation. In addition to this series, we offer technical assistance and resources in performance management to improve public health outcomes. If you would like to talk with us about how we might assist your organization, contact information is on the preceding slide.