Strategic Planning.fm

Why should we be interested in strategic planning for our information-development organizations? We might simply apply specific tactics for getting our everyday jobs done. We might focus our concerns on producing a manual or getting the online help finished. We might even plan far enough in advance to send staff members to workshops on the latest online help development tools. These tactics would get us through the day, or the week, or even through the end of the year, and we would be busy doing useful things (or at least things that we hope others find useful). But as we keep busy doing our everyday jobs, we may find ourselves surprised by the decisions of those who decide to eliminate our function, outsource our tasks, or disperse our staff throughout the organization. Only then we will recognize that we lacked an overall goal, a vision of what we should be doing, of how we want to be perceived in the future. By concentrating on the immediate job at hand, we pursue tactics to meet specific and immediate objectives but we lack an overall strategy that helps us decide whether we are concentrating on the tasks that will add value to our organizations and convince others that we have a legitimate purpose for our existence. Both external and internal forces push us toward strategic planning. The senior management of the organizations we work for ask us to reduce the costs of what we do or find out why customers are complaining about the quality of the technical publications. We want to do our jobs more effectively by allowing time to get out and meet the customers, introduce new and better methods of working, integrate usability testing into our process, and create information that we can be proud of. Because of pressure from management and customers as well as our own desires to do a better job, we are urged to build more effective information-development organizations. Strategic planning is an important means to help us succeed. Strategic planning helps us to establish goals and outline the steps necessary to reach our goals. Without a plan in place, we are likely to engage in activities that seem interesting at the time but don’t make our work significantly better nor improve our work environment. With a strategic plan, we can set aside activities that don’t lead in the direction we want to go and emphasize activities that are most likely to move us in the right direction. Strategic planning enables us to respond to the organizational pressure we experience. Many information-development organizations feel threatened by the pressure to reduce costs, eliminate jobs, do more work with the same or fewer people, hire more temporary workers, reduce the number of permanent staff, even outsource the entire effort to another company. If managers and staff members don’t find a way to do a better job than they are doing today, increase customer satisfaction with their efforts, and be recognized as significant contributors to the organization’s bottom line, they will often find their jobs eliminated in favor of cheaper alternatives. In a high-pressure business climate, strategic planning becomes critical not only to our success but also to our survival. We cannot stay the same, even if we have been doing what we thought was a pretty good job. We have to find ways to do a better job, and in many cases, do that job faster and with the same or fewer resources. The strategic planning process begins with several key investigatory steps: