Getty Images/Leon Zernitsky

By Raphael M. Barishansky, MPH, &
Katherine E. O’Connor, BS, EMT-P

Business experts have long considered strategic planning a necessary tool for success, but we suspect that few communications centers develop and implement meaningful strategic plans. 

Strategic planning is rooted in future-oriented, proactive thinking that anticipates change and adopts long-term strategies to meet the demands of that change. In other words, it is a “master plan” for your comm center. It is also a management tool that will help your organization focus its energies appropriately. 

While strategy defines patterns of objectives, purposes or goals and major policies for achieving those goals, a strategic plan is a document that determines the needs of an organization that will enable it to realize its vision and mission. 

Increasing demands on public safety communications and changing technological and political environments challenge all comm centers. A well thought-out strategic plan developed with input from all levels of your organization may be the thing that allows your service to thrive. 

A strategic plan can also provide overall direction to an organization or specific direction in such areas as financial strategies (planning for financial ups and downs), human resource/organizational development strategies (understanding the nature of the workforce), information technology deployments (including the advent of broadband wireless communications) and marketing/public education strategies. 

Strategic planning should seek to answer four fundamental questions:

1. Where are we going (defined by the agency’s vision and mission statements)?
2. How do we get there (defined by specific goals)?
3. What is our blueprint for action (the action steps for achieving the goals)?
4. How do we know if we are on track (assessment and revision)?

Depending on your center’s needs, specific situation and time frames, you may want to develop short- and/or long-term strategic plans. You also will want to determine objectives to reach those goals, which can be immediate (to be accomplished within one year), short term (two to five years) and long term (more than three years to initiate and fewer than 10 years to complete). Regardless of the duration, the scope of this forecasting should focus on multiple facets of your agency, including, but not limited to, finance, personnel, logistics, operations and administration. 

SWOT & Mission & Vision Statements
Sometimes referred to as a S-W-O-T (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, the situational analysis is a hard look at the current state of your comm center, as well as the factors that have the potential to change that state. It is an examination of the forces, both internal (in the form of the strengths and weaknesses) and external (in the form of the opportunities and threats), that have a potential impact on your organization. 

As the name implies, the SWOT analysis requires the agency to ask some tough questions, such as: Who are you? Where are you right now? Where do want to be? Can you actually get there? How can you achieve it? And how do you start the strategic planning process? 

Well-researched and written mission and vision statements are the next integral parts of your center’s strategic plan. 

A mission statement defines the center’s business, its objectives and its approach to reach those objectives (but does not prescribe the means for reaching those objectives). An effective mission statement: 

• Is short and sharply focused;
• Is clear and easily understood;
• Is sufficiently broad;
• Defines why you do what you do (why the organization exists);
• Provides direction for doing the right things;
• Identifies opportunities;
• Matches organizational competence;
• Inspires commitment; and
• Says what you want to be remembered for.

For example, Dane County (Wis.) Public Safety Communications (9-1-1) has developed a mission statement that meets these criteria: “The mission of the Dane County Public Safety Com­munications Depart­ment is to provide a fast, effective communi­cations link between the citizens of Dane County requesting public safety services and the public safety agencies charged with providing emergency and non-emergency services to those citizens.”[1] 

Once you have developed a mission statement to define the business of the organization, you should create a vision statement to describe your organization’s desired future position. To be effective, a vision statement should: 

• Paint a vivid and clear picture;
• Describe a bright future (hope);
• Be memorable and engaging in expression;
• Establish realistic and achievable aspirations; and
• Align with stated organizational values and culture.

The Catawba County (N.C.) E911 Com­munications Center developed a vision statement that includes these attributes: “To be a 911 center that achieves the highest public confidence, recognized for leadership, professionalism and innovation.”[2] 

This vision statement uses key adjectives to draw a clear picture for all involved showing what the comm center feels it can become. 

Goals, Plans & Tactics
To address strategic issues and develop deliberate strategies for achieving your mission, develop strategic goals, action plans and tactics during the strategic programming stage. 

• Strategic goals evolve from the strategic issues and describe the milestones the comm center aims to achieve. Goals should be SMART (i.e., specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and timely) and include deadlines and estimates of the cost involved.
• Action plans define how you get to where you want to go (i.e., the steps required to reach your strategic goals).
• Tactics are specific actions you plan to use to implement the strategic plans and achieve strategic goals.

Remember: A strategic plan is not a laundry list of goals, but rather should reflect the priorities of those who participate in the planning process. 

The most useful plans are succinct and easily translated into useful measures. Including too many goals can cause your organization to become overwhelmed with minutiae. Bear in mind that just one recommendation can translate into a number of broad goals made up of multiple objectives. 

After a comm center develops and disseminates realistic mission and vision statements, the next step in the strategic planning process is to develop objectives and realistic time lines for completing those objectives. 

Objectives are specific, measurable results produced by implementing strategies to make your vision a reality. During the process of identifying objectives, keep asking, “Are these objectives obtainable?” Don’t set yourself up for failure by establishing unrealistic expectations. 

To meet those objectives, you need to set specific time lines (e.g., one week, one month, three months, a year) in which you expect to accomplish each one. Again, be realistic about your organization’s ability to meet the expectation in those time frames. 

To ensure everyone keeps the plan in mind, integrate your current year’s objectives as performance criteria into the job description and the performance review of each “implementer.” 

Remember that objectives and their time lines are only guidelines, not rules set in stone. A strategic plan should allow for flexibility. However, it should not allow deviations without good reason and without being able to explain how a deviation will affect the plan’s end goals. 

Action Plans/Work Plans
Now you need plans to specify the actions needed to address each of the top organizational issues and to reach each of the associated goals. These action or work plans specify the responsibilities of individuals in the organization for completing each component and the time lines in which they should accomplish them. To begin, upper management must: 

• Develop an overall executive action plan that describes how each strategic goal will be reached. The format of that plan will depend on the nature and needs of your organization.
• Develop an action plan for each major function in the organization (e.g., marketing, development, fin­ance and personnel) and for each program within the organization. Each of these plans must identify its relationship to the organization’s executive action plan.
• Ensure that each manager (and, ideally, each employee) has an action plan that contributes to the executive plan. Again, the relationship of these action plans to the organization’s overall executive action plan must be identified. These plans constitute the step-by-step playbook by which each major function will realize its part of the plan and by which your org­anization will reach the objectives described in your master plan.

The plan for the organization, each major function, each manager and each employee might specify: 

• The goals or objectives they should accomplish;
• Time lines for each objective or goal;
• How those results or objectives will be achieved;
• How each goal contributes to the overall strategic plan; and
• Objectives that must be reached to attain the organization’s ultimate goal.

Implement Your Plan
One of the trickiest segue points in the process is the shift in focus from writing a strategic plan to actual implementation of the various components of the strategic plan within an organization. The failure to build a bridge between the strategic planning process and the implementation processes is a critical mistake and the major reason most strategic plans don’t work. 

If a strategic plan fails, the culprit is usually an inappropriate strategy or poor implementation. 

Inappropriate strategies may arise due to: 

• A failure to correctly define objectives;
• Lack of creativity in identifying possible strategies;
• Strategies incapable of obtaining the desired objective; or
• A poor fit between the external environment and organizational resources.

Poor implementation of a strategic plan may be due to: 

• Overestimation of resources and abilities;
• Failure to coordinate;
• Overall resistance;
• Underestimation of time, personnel or financial requirements;
• Failure to follow the plan; or
• Failure to update the plan when necessary.

Keys to Success
To avoid those dangers and ensure success, your strategic plan should be: 

• Realistic: Continue to ask planning participants, “Can you really do this?” Don’t set your organization up for failure by asking for the impossible.
• Inclusionary: It’s critical to involve representatives of all sectors that will be impacted by the plan as early in the process as possible. Failure to do so will almost assuredly significantly stall, or even prevent, successful implementation.
• Incorporated: Translate your strategic plan’s actions into job descriptions and personnel performance reviews. Weaving the plan’s expectations into the very fabric of your organization will prevent employees from viewing it as simply one more management technique to ignore.
• Nurtured: A strategic plan is a living body of work that needs care and attention and constant review and revision, if necessary. Employees at all levels should regularly see all or part of this plan. Don’t make the common mistake of putting your strategic plan on an executive’s shelf to be admired.

Remember, a strategic plan is not a “quick fix,” a substitute for the judgment of an agency’s leadership, created by an independent decision-maker, a predictor of the future or set in stone. 

Strategic plans all too frequently end up collecting dust on a shelf or become irrelevant by the time they are completed. Comm center leadership, which generally is responsible for time- and resource-starved entities, can’t afford to waste efforts on strategic plans that are not properly nurtured and implemented. 

On the other hand, a center that does the proper planning and implementation and works to keep its strategic plan healthy and relevant will be rewarded with a good tool to keep the organization strong, prosperous and ready to meet whatever challenges the future brings. 

About the Authors
Raphael M. Barishansky, MPH, is executive director of the Hudson Valley Regional EMS Council in Newburgh, N.Y., and a frequent contributor to various EMS publications. Contact him at [email protected]. 

Katherine E. O’Connor, BS, EMT-P, is program coordinator for the Westchester Regional EMS Council in Valhalla, N.Y., and has been an EMS provider and educator for 16 years. Contact her at [email protected]. 

Editor’s note: This article has been updated and adapted from a two-part series that originally appeared in EMS Insider, August and September 2006.  

References
1. www.countyofdane.com/911
2. www.catawbacountync.gov/depts/communic/ 

Originally published in Public Safety Communications magazine, Vol. 74(5):42-48, May 2008.