Action plan

There are two more steps to finish answering question “How do we get there”.

When strategic goals and objectives are set, you should discuss with your team how you will reach those goals. Steps for reaching goals and objectives in defined time frame is called action plan. To support you in creating your plan of actions, we prepare a basic table that you should fill in for each of the objectives:

• Which activities you are going to do to reach your objective

• What are expected results from those activities

• Who will be in charge for running/coordinating this activity

• What is a deadline for realization of the activity

Upon finishing with your action plan, it is a perfect time to go back and take a look into your organizational capacities and resources. See if your organizational strategic plan is realistic and achievable. You may find that your strategic plan is achievable with resources you have or that is not. If second scenario turn out to be in place, then there some decisions to be made before you finish with your strategy:

1. Is there possibility to enlarge resources in order to fulfill your strategic plan and how?

2. And if there is not, then hard choices of prioritizing some strategic goals over other is ahead of you. Be bold when making decisions.

TIPS AND TRICKS WHEN MAKING STRATEGIC PLANNING

Now, you are ready to develop a strategic plan of your organization. Remember:

“Failing to plan is planning to fail”

Alan Lakein

At the end, we would like to share with you several principles you should have in mind when develop strategic plan:

1. Idea of developing a strategic plan needs to be either supported or even better initiated from the top management of your organization.
2. Share a process – make sure to involve all relevant people from your organization, from leaders to volunteers. Consider importance of sharing process with your partners, stakeholders or donors. They might bring additional value to your planning process, and more importantly get sense of ownership over it.
3. Learn from your past mistakes or examples of other NGOs. Dedicating time to analyze past mistakes or review strategic plans and successes and failures of other organizations can help you avoid making mistakes and design a better plan.
4. Beside making process inclusive, you should also make it practical, simple and understandable to everyone.
5. Value of strategic planning is not in possessing a document, but in its practical implementation. Use it in your everyday work!
6. Organize gatherings once a year to review your strategic plan. It can happen that you succeeded with your goals and now need to define new one, or that you figure out that reaching certain goal is not realistic thus demands a change.
7. Be bold! Some decisions might seem hard to make. However, your aim is to reach your vision, thus this approach is necessary.

Objectives are directly linked to the goals and should be expressed in concrete, measurable terms. An objective is something that can be documented; it’s factual and observable. Objectives measure the actions and outcomes/results you have decided you need to enable goal to be achieved.

Good luck with designing your strategic plan! 😀