Step 8 :: Manage Strategic Planning Process
This next step calls for a commitment from planning partners to adopt and proceed with implementing one or more strategies. Success is more likely to occur where there is active involvement of area organizations. Responsible organizations must be engaged to administer ‘strategies to manage issues’. The operational plan defines the efforts to be undertaken to implement a strategy with the resources already in hand. This might entail establishing a general administration (implementation) process or detailed scope of work for carrying out the initiative.
Administration of Work. The overall approach to managing the issues can vary, for example:
1. Stakeholder Management – The key to stakeholder management is the involvement of the project’s stakeholders – anyone with a vested interest in the success or failure of the project – in each step required to make project completion a reality. Thus, a key to stakeholder management is understanding who really makes the project implementation decisions and who (or which organization) influences project success or failure.
2. Portfolio Management – The idea behind portfolio management is to use any appropriate public policy tool, – training and technical assistance, financing, advocacy, legal mandates, etc – to implement a course of action. The approach is opportunistic in nature, making use of the talent, time, funding and other resources from any source available.
3. Strategic Management – Strategic management seeks to align resources of the organization to produce products or services to meet customer needs, attentive to the internal (organizational) capacity and strengths to produce and to the external environment’s influences on the customer and the customer’s needs.
Statement of Work. The following written device can be used to manage a project on a day-to-day basis:
1. Write a Scope of Work / Write a Scope of Work – For some courses of action, a better project management tool is the implementation plan, also called a scope of work. An implementation plan identifies key project milestones, the series of time-phased activities required to carry out a project or course of action, the organizational unit responsible for completing tasks, and the standards by which completion will be gauged.
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