Collective Results is celebrating our two year business anniversary! To celebrate, we’re blogging about some of the projects that we have enjoyed working on over the past year. Each week, we’ll share one or two examples of projects that fall under our different areas of service. This blog focuses on our strategic planning work.
Strategic Planning
Over the past two years, Collective Results has had the opportunity to work with several different agencies and one provincial network to help develop strategic plans. We also just started up two additional strategic planning projects with new clients this month!
Our strategic planning consultants often get a few funny looks or nervous chuckles when we begin each kickoff meeting stating how much we LOVE strategic planning (we really do!). It’s the challenge of taking big, scattered, complex ideas and helping to organize them into an actionable strategic plan where we thrive. Our strategic planning approach is customized to meet the needs of each client we work with, and we have also honed an effective step-by-step process that we can build on. We have found that this process allows for valuable time in between sessions for reflection and refinement that is very beneficial – not only for us as facilitators to have time to review and synthesize concepts but also for our clients to have time to reflect and better see the idea transformation from session to session. We continue to learn from and enhance our strategic planning approach with each client, whether it’s finding new ways to embed equity, diversity, and inclusion principles into the process, or recognizing we can produce a quality strategic plan in a short duration (just 3 weeks!) if working under tight timelines.
We also offer services that can accompany a strategic plan and help an organization “live into” it, put it into action, and measure it. We have been assisting organizions with implementation planning and implementation supports, operational planning, and with key performance indicator development and monitoring services. We love this work because it allows us to see the plan we have developed in action, and it also helps us to stay connected to the real-life situations in organizations so that we can ensure that the plans we produce are realistic, actionable, and measurable.
With our most recent project, at the end of the strategic planning sessions, one of the frontline staff members who was a part of the development committee remarked on how engaged and valued they felt throughout the whole process. They said our strategic planning process was better than they were expecting and they expressed how much they enjoyed being involved. This is just about one of the best compliments a couple of ‘strategic planning nerds’ like us could receive!
We can’t wait to support more strategic planning projects in the future!