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*Strategic Planning Forward:
A Department of Transportation employee wrote this article. He has graciously submitted data and procedures that were used for the development and implementation for a strategic plan with the mission and goals related to the Department of Transportation.
"I have worked for the Department of Transportation in District 10 - Marietta, Ohio for 21 years. Throughout my career, I have been involved with several projects in relation to organizational development. One of the most rewarding experiences was working on the strategic plan. We have had outstanding results with this new methodology of management and I would like to share our approach, deployment and outcomes with you in this article."
An Introduction to Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning stresses that customer-driven quality and operational performance excellence are key strategic issues that need to be integral parts of an organizations overall planning.
Specifically: Customer-driven quality is a strategic view of quality. The focus is on the drivers of customer satisfaction, and key factors of organizational performance related to the budget and product or service success.
Operational performance improvement contributes to short-term and longer-term productivity growth and cost/price competitiveness. Building operational capability � including speed, responsiveness, and flexibility � represents an investment in strengthening competitive fitness.
An organization needs to emphasize that improvement and learning are embedded in work processes. The special role of strategic planning is to align work processes with the organization's strategic directions, thereby ensuring that improvement and learning reinforce organizational priorities.
Strategic Planning should reflect how organizations understand their key customers and operational requirements as input to setting strategic directions. This helps ensure that ongoing process improvements are aligned with the organization's strategic directions, optimize the use of resources, ensure the availability of trained employees, and ensure bridging between short-term and longer-term requirements.
To ensure that deployment will be effective � there needs to be mechanisms to transmit requirements and achieve alignment on three basic levels: (1) organization/executive level; (2) key process level; and (3) work-unit/individual-job level. The requirements for strategic planning require strategic thinking and acting � to develop a basis for a distinct competitive position with the private sector.
Outline Links
As strategic planning is a very involved and somewhat lengthy process, the following link outline will assist in navigation of this article:
- Strategy Development (Multi-Year Work Plan)
- Strategy Deployment Action Plan (step 1)
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