It's better to have a truly strategic conversation than a cookie cutter strategic plan. Organizational similarities between associations tend to make getting to the strategic conversation a common process, but every organization has different needs once the conversation starts.
CMI Celebrates Our Tenth Anniversary!
1998 - 2008 |
Strategic Planning & Facilitation
Governing boards set the course for associations, but the press of day-to-day business can get in the way of broader "strategic thinking." Consequently, organizations can tend to operate on inertia...with too little energy given to broader strategic issues.
The professionals at Challenge Management work with association governing boards and staff members to develop solid strategic plans and the action plans to ensure that they are effectively implemented...ours is a tactical approach to strategic planning. Our approach to developing strategic plans typically follows the following process format:
- Review the association's recent history, its founding principles, past successes, current "hot topics" of importance to the industry or profession, and other relevant factors necessary to understand the "state of the association"
- Develop or review/refine mission statement
- Develop or review/refine statement of organizational vision
- Conduct an environmental scan, identifying emerging issues that will tend to have an impact, either positive or negative, on association members
- Assess the stated or implied needs and expectations that members have of the association
- Establish priorities that address members' business and/or professional environments and that respond to members' needs and expectations
- Develop broad assessments of financial, human, and other resources necessary to implement agreed priorities
- Develop task timelines and responsibilities for creating tactics to implement strategic priorities
- Establish review schedule to measure progress toward implementing strategic plan
- Recommend institutionalization of strategic review and planning process to ensure currency and value of strategic planning efforts (because we believe budgets are the financial expressions of organizations' strategic plans, we recommend mechanisms to ensure that the budget follows the plan, rather than vice versa)
- Follow-up
Following our strategic planning sessions, which typically involve several days of preparatory work, one to two days of on-site facilitation, and several days of follow-up and reporting, we periodically check with the association to learn whether progress is being made as expected and offer advice to ensure ongoing progress.
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Strategic Planning Services
The list to the left is a list of processes. Processes are important. But they don't pay the bills. What you're after is achievement! You've probably heard it said before: "If a strategic planning facilitator comes to the table with an opinion, he's not doing his job." We couldn't disagree more. Not only do we come to the table with an opinion, we come with biases and an agenda. That agenda is this: everything is open for discussion. Everything!
In advance of the strategic planning sessions, we interview staff and voluteer leaders, focusing on what they think is working, what is not, and what the believe the association's objectives should be for the immediate near term and the next 1-3 years. Then, we talk to a cross section of active and inactive members and get their feedback. We try to identify sacred cows, if there are any, because we want to deal with those issues early. Our agenda is to remove political motives from the table and replace them with performance motives.
And our biases? We put them on the table, up front, and we test everything against them, working hard to ensure that our biases don't impinge on your association. We're real people, but we work to make absolutely certain that, when the strategic conversations are over, the wants and needs of your association are the drivers of your performance.
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