Strategic planning in the public sector

Strategic Planning in the Public Sector
According to the "Strategic planning is an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes/results, and assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment." Planers use strategic planning to guide their organization towards their intended goals. Strategic planning produces result-oriented plans that look towards the future by assessing the existing conditions and determining what course of action is necessary in order to move towards their intended goal they have for the future of their organization.
Advantages of Strategic Planning
Author Paul Posner in the 2012 journal of The Public Manager offers the suggestion that if government agencies can develop more sophisticated models and metric systems it will better be able to more clearly identify a government agency's contributions to complex issues and it will be able to better meet its long-term goals when it comes to developing valid outcomes and results that government can use. This makes it possible that government agencies will be able to attract and retain motivated people to fill vital positions and create a federal hiring processes that is more responsive than those in the private sector and a federal compensation scheme that is more flexible or performance focused as its private competitors. Paul then developed a promising two-step approach to the implementation of strategic planning and it showed positive results when it was used by a some government agencies. First it examines the agency's processes, organizational, design, and contextual aspects and top management leadership and commitment dimensions. Second, it examined those results and the measures of strategic planning effectiveness from those charged with strategic planning
Author Francis Stokes Berry in the 1994 Public Administration Review lists these factors as necessary for the successful implementation of strategic planning as fiscal health of an agency,the larger the agency-the more likely strategic planning is happen, during gubernatorial administrations cycles happen, when agencies work closely with the private sector, and the greater the extent of government agencies in public reach. Author Sergio Fernandez in the Australian Journal of Public Administration provided a study of public sector reform in the United States and how frontline public sector employees are vital innovators based on data from the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey. Fernandez lists how this bottom-up innovation approach is an incubators of re-inventions, where ideas are discovered, learned, borrowed, adopted, and evolve through trial and error and is introduced throughout other agencies. It is also street-level bureaucrats who also influence the final form of the innovation and this is encouraging point for government agencies to keep building on this method. Author Paul Posner explains that the advantages of having government checks and balances in the Journal of the Public Manager which limit improper activity within government and outside of government such political appointments that increasingly layer the government positions with political leaders of close association.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu