Core Elements of Strategic Planning

¶ … human service administrators should use to develop and implement strategic plans.

Three of these core principles are the following:

the fundamentals - the core values, mission, and vision, which represent the organizational identification (ID).

the strategic issues - including a SWOT analysis tool, which highlights strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strategic issues also include a gap analysis, an environmental scan, and stakeholder surveys.

the technicals - these include items such as strategic goals, strategies, leading indicators of success, performance targets, and action plans for each year of the strategic plan. The technicals element is the executable part of the strategic plan.

Each of these three key principles are interrelated and looped together and each needs the other to work.

We see an example of this in the Strategic Plan of Illinois: 2011-2017 (2010) where the Department of Human Services (DHS), Division of Developmental Disabilities (the Division) presents its fiscal plan for Illinois for the years 2011-2017.

The Division provides a complex and huge array of services. In numbers, this boils down to approximately 350 agencies that are funded by Medicaid and employ 4,100 employees. The services that service approximately 16500 people range from "24-hour residential services to specialized therapies, personal support services, day programs, Individual Service and Support Advocacy (ISSA), and respite."

The Division also administers 300 private Intermediate Care Facilities for Individuals with Development

Disabilities (ICFs/DD) and Skilled Nursing Facilities for Pediatrics (SNFs/Ped). Approximately 6,530 people live in these settings.

The Division also helps 2,100 individuals with developmental disabilities who reside in eight state-operated developmental centers (SODCs). These provide services and training to people with developmental disability so as to help them function with as much self-dependence as possible.

The Division has also helped nearly 15000 children and adults with developmental disabilities through non-Medicaid programs offered through 160 agencies.

All of the above can be described as their 'technicals' -- namely their goals, plans, the practical steps to achieving their objective and their core program.

Their vision is to help all children and adults who live in Illinois and suffer form developmental difficulty with avast array of high quality programs and without needing to wait for service. Their mission is to cater their program to the specific needs of each individual and to help each individual live in independent way to the best of his ability.

The vision and mission as well as their guiding principles (which are their 'fundamentals -- namely their basis) guide their steps and objectives and result in their core program (the 'technical').

The SWOT -- strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats is the overall assessment of their objectives and program. It is an assessment of how far they have come in realization of their objectives and whether their program is indeed achieving their vision and mission.

The whole can be realized by the graphics illustrated on the page.

The first set of graphics depicts the person in the middle. This middle orbit may well represent the fundamentals where all emerge from the vision, mission, guiding principles. The planning, services, thinking, philosophy that orbit the middle circle represent the different strategies and 'technicals' -- namely programs / steps that are being implemented. The fundamentals holds them in place, but they, in turn, a re needed to actualize the fundamentals. And similarly, the SWOT is needed in order to assess whether the technical are accomplishing the fundamentals. It is in this way that one holistic picture / program, is implemented and that all core elements function inseparably together.