I spend a lot of my time doing strategic planning with our utility clients. Certainly, we do strategic plans with local government as well, but my role has been primarily on the utility front. I would describe our strategic planning process as engaging with organizations to really understand where they are today. What are some of the things that they’re grappling with? What are some of the things that they want to change or could do better as an organization? Where do they want to be in the future? What does success look like three years from now? What does success look like five years from now?
And then, how do we actually move in that direction? How do we get an organization that maybe doesn’t have a long history of doing things differently to think a little bit differently about the resources that they have and the work that they’re doing in order to get where they want to be?
Utilities use strategic plans in different ways, and our process is built to support the idea that there are some distinct phases in the process, and there are different ways that you would use each phase. Oftentimes, people are going in so many different directions; organizations have so many priorities that just the process of bringing people together and understanding what is important to the organization is really useful. Because it can build alignment and help people understand priorities moving forward, a strategic plan is also a communication piece. A way to share with employees who have a specific job function what it is that the larger organization is focused on. How can my job connect to a larger organization? Or, for external partners, how can the work of other organizations connect to the work of the organization that we’re working with?
Well, I would say there are two different kinds of phases and two different challenges. When it comes to actually developing the plan, prioritization is often a big challenge that our clients run into. We understand that the utilities that we do strategic planning with don’t have unlimited time or money to do all of the things they’d like to be able to do. It is so easy to create a long list of everything we’d like to do if we did have unlimited resources. But prioritization can be really, really challenging because you want to do all of those things. But what are we realistically, signing up for the next three, five years? What are the things that really rise to the top?
When it comes time to implement, it’s a different set of challenges. Oftentimes, one of the most significant challenges is around having the capacity to transition from thinking of your strategic plan as a project that has a defined kind of start date and an end date and deliverable to an ongoing process. How are we making sure that implementation happens? How are we making sure that we’re able to report on the progress that we’re making? Strategic plans cover your entire organization. So how do we get information from all of the places where progress is happening to a central point?
It makes it really challenging to do that if you haven’t thought through your implementation approach and you don’t have some dedicated people or processes, or technology to help bring all of that information together and demonstrate that progress is actually happening. It’s really easy for strategic plans to be that proverbial document that sits on a shelf. Without the ongoing progress reporting, monitoring, and tracking, strategic plans can really become irrelevant, and that’s not the goal.
Well, I think that a lot of the reason that you do a strategic plan is to make sure that there is kind of a clear statement of an organization’s goals and values.
So, what we do, and part of our process, is to connect with as many different stakeholder groups as possible to really understand what’s most important to them. What are the things that they’re focused on? What are the things that they believe that the organization should do more of, differently, innovate around, in order to be successful in the future?
So, ensuring that we have a lot of different stakeholders involved in the process and that we’re asking the right questions at the right point in the process really helps us ensure that the plan that we’re creating captures the things that are most important for the organization moving forward.
I think that there are a lot of examples, both large and small, of projects that started as to dos in an organization’s strategic plan. One that comes to mind is, we did a utility strategic plan with Nashville Metro Water Services, several years ago. We started planning with them in 2016. One of the things that was really important to them was that they start to involve customers more in their processes. They had a strategy around doing a customer satisfaction survey. As the iteration of the plan from 2016 was coming to a close, we reengaged with them to do an update.
As part of that, we did a large-scale customer satisfaction survey for Nashville. We had more than 5,000 customers respond, and they were able to take that data and, apply it to their organizational priorities and make some really significant changes to the way that they’re delivering customer service, in alignment with some of what they learned from that survey. So, I think that a strategic plan can really help us figure out what information we need or what information might help us to move forward with different things that are on our agendas.
Buy-in is a really big deal, and I’m working right now with the Philadelphia Water Department. One of the things that their commissioner said very early on in the process was that we have a lot of different groups in our water department who are excellent, best in class, and going in all sorts of different directions. The strategic plan needs to be what helps them to move in the same direction. Understanding again that there are a lot of different priorities an organization might have, having an understanding of what those different priorities are, and involving people in the process helps us to ensure that when it comes time for implementation, when it comes time to actually take the plan and run with it, that we have the buy-in that we need in order for the organization to move forward. And move forward in one direction rather than moving forward in all of the different directions.
I would say that when it comes to implementing a strategic plan, one of the most challenging things can be not having dedicated resources to make sure that it stays a priority. Not having dedicated resources to make sure that it’s being communicated and staying top of mind. One of the things that we always recommend is starting the implementation conversation really early in a strategic planning process. We want to make sure that the organization that we’re working with is really thinking through this. Who is responsible for this? Who’s responsible for getting all of the information together? Who’s responsible for making sure that groups of employees meet on a regular basis and make progress? Who’s responsible for identifying barriers and working to either remove those or change the organization’s strategies to make sure that they can still move forward?
There are some operational changes that happen over the course of a five-year time horizon. Between technology and regulatory changes and, in some cases a global pandemic, the priorities for an organization might look really, really different in year four than they do in year one. So, there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that the plan is adaptable and can reflect the needs and priorities of the day as much as it reflects the needs and priorities of the folks who developed it at whatever point.
Some of the things that utilities should consider when they are working to implement their strategic plan is, again, that level of ownership. Who is responsible for making sure that the plan actually moves forward? What is the reporting cadence? What do your elected officials or your board members expect to know about on a regular basis? And how are you making sure that they’re getting that information?
Another big thing to keep in mind when you’re in that implementation process is thinking through once we do this round of activities, what comes next? How do we ensure that we have a smooth flow between the year-to-year or project-to-project? I think that one of the things that can be challenging is that, especially when you’re first starting a strategic plan and you haven’t got a previous strategic plan to be working from, sometimes there are projects that are already in place, and you won’t have capacity to do other things until you finish some of the things that are already on your list. So, how do you ensure you’re making progress and moving forward, even though you can’t necessarily do everything that you’d like to first thing? And how do we think through the sequencing and arrangement of resources to make sure that you are, in fact, making progress on the different things that you’re prioritizing?
If I were to give some advice to utility leaders as they’re starting to think about strategic planning, I would initially think about how to be as inclusive as possible in terms of stakeholder engagement. How do we make sure that this is something where we gather input from everyone in the organization, from the folks on the front line to the folks in the lab to the folks at the treatment plants? Having that engagement will help people to feel more connected to the organization and to the direction that the organization is moving, which can help with change management. It can help later on when you’re trying to get the organization to think about things differently. We try to be as inclusive in our engagement as possible, and that’s both internal stakeholders and external stakeholders.
Being inclusive and getting a lot of voices into a process, it takes time, and it takes some resources, and it takes some coordination. Some folks are surprised by what that actually looks like in terms of a project schedule. Really thinking through at the beginning, at both what stakeholder engagement looks like, but also, what comes next? How do we keep those stakeholders involved? How do we make sure that it wasn’t a situation where they’ve just provided input and then never heard anything again? We want this to be the start of a conversation.
I love a lot of things about the work that I do at Raftelis. I think of myself as a connector and one of the things that I really enjoy about my job and about the work that we do is being on-site with clients and having conversations. I like learning what people are focused on, what organizations are grappling with, and how they are addressing the challenges that they’re facing.
In a lot of cases, there’s a fair amount of overlap between a utility we’re working with in South Carolina and a utility we’re working with in New York or in Denver or in California. Having the opportunity to do some knowledge sharing, having the opportunity to see best practices in action and be able to share that amongst our clients and also amongst the staff at Raftelis has been really meaningful for me.
A couple of examples might be from the Baltimore Department of Public Works, which has created the Office of Strategy and Performance, which is a group that manages its strategic plan. It does a lot of the reporting on special metrics associated with each of its divisions, and it also will do reporting on the progress and the activities associated with the strategic plan.
There are also organizations that will put a department head or a division chair in charge of it. It really depends on the organization’s maturity and some of the processes that it has in place around strategic planning.
For example, if an organization is just starting strategic planning for the first time, they don’t have kind of organizational capacity built around it, they don’t have processes that help to get information from a lot of different places in the organization to a central point for reporting and tracking and monitoring purposes, then it can make a lot of sense to have a person who is responsible for all of that and responsible for kind of coordinating and making sure that these projects are actually happening and that the information is flowing back to a central point. If a utility has a longstanding tradition of doing strategic planning, of doing different types of planning, if they’re already good at some of those things in terms of the communication and the monitoring and the tracking, you may not need a designated resource to be able to manage that. You might be able to lean on processes that are already in place. Metro Water Recovery, a large wastewater treatment organization that serves the greater Denver area, has a great program around having business cases for all of its projects and making sure that things are monitored that way.
There’s no reason to create another set of processes if you’ve already got some in place that work really well. Helping implementation to work really depends on the organization’s readiness and some of the pathways that are already in place to do all of the things that I’ve been describing.
For more information on utility strategic planning, contact Catherine Carter at ccarter@raftelis.com.