Is it Time to Revise Your Strategic Plan?
A good strategic plan is one of the most effective tools to help you achieve your mission. It explains where your organization is going and how you plan to get there. It codifies your organization’s goals and priorities, and details the steps you expect to take to reach them.
In order to remain useful and relevant, though, a strategic plan needs to be regularly revisited to ensure that it is up to date and addresses current realities, challenges, and opportunities.
An easy way to assess whether it is time to revise your strategic plan is to ask yourself the questions below.
- Is the world or community we work in the same as it was when we created this plan?
- Are our goals accurately captured by our strategic plan?
- Does it lay out realistic steps to help us achieve them?
- Does it effectively represent who we are?
- Is it up to date?
- Does it lay out a resource plan that matches our current financial and operational needs or realities?
If you answer no to any of these, it might be time to update your strategic plan. Here are five of the more common scenarios that indicate it might be time to revise your strategic plan.
1. Your Current Plan Is Expiring
If you’ve accomplished what you initially set out to achieve or your current plan is nearing expiration, now is the time to start looking ahead and charting a course for the future. Planning early ensures you don’t get caught on your heels.
2. The Urgent Has Overtaken the Important
When an organization is more reactive than proactive, it can end up losing its focus or abandoning its long-term goals. If this is happening, it is a good time to reassess priorities, and then revise the organization’s strategic plan to help refocus efforts accordingly.
3. You’ve Fallen Prey to Scope Creep
It happens to the best of us. You start out with clear goals and a focused mission, only to find several years later that your focus has shifted away from core programming or projects that truly serve your mission.
Your team may feel they’re pursuing a variety of only loosely-related tasks, they’re serving disparate groups, or that programs are not working well together.
If you have a hard time describing succinctly what your organization does (to prospective funders, for example), you may have succumbed to scope creep.
4. Your Organization is Outgrowing its Current Strategic Plan
When an organization enters a new stage of development, it usually calls for a revised strategic plan. You’ll know it’s time if you have:
- Professionalized and/or expanded staff and board
- Increased funding
- Consolidated current programming and are ready to expand
- Undergone or are planning a leadership transition
- Meaningfully grown in size, stature, skill or capabilities
5. There’s a Change in the Operating Environment
When there is a change in the world around you, you should take a step back and re-evaluate how this affects your operations or objectives. External forces outside your organization’s control can change needs around you, creating new opportunities or threats, and so may call for you to revisit your strategic plan.
This scenario will be true for most organizations in 2022. Heavy restrictions on in-person gatherings upended normal operations, impacting not only how organizations tried to meet their mission, but even what objectives they were pursuing. Now in a world transformed, organizations are continuing to adapt to meet these massive changes.
Other external factors include:
- Changes in the needs of customers, beneficiaries, or participants
- Major changes in public policy
- Changes in the funding environment
- Changes in government regulations and policy
- Demographic changes
Wrapping Up
Change is the only constant in any organization, but there are a host of changes, both internal and external to your organization that signal it is time to review or revise your strategic plan. A great strategic plan can be an important tool, but if changes in your organization, or outside have rendered your plan ineffective, insufficient or not reflective of your needs, or if your current plan is just coming to an end, it won’t be doing the job it was designed to do. If any of these scenarios feel familiar and you want to learn more or want our help, don’t hesitate to reach out.