Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Assessing the Organization

The elements of the Strategic Planning Foundation – Vision, Mission, Goals & Objectives, and Principles take the first step to address the needs discovered during the Environmental and Organizational Assessment performed in the Strategic Planning portion of a Strategic Technology Services Management system. Its important to perform an in-depth organizational assessment through review of prior planning projects or vision reports combined with interviews and surveys of management, staff, or other stakeholders to:
  • Identify environmental forces, major business drivers, and enduring values
  • Document specific external or internal business, societal, and technology trends potentially affecting technology services & the organization
  • List specific external and internal challenges or uncertainties facing technology services & the organization
  • Discover technology and best practices in those areas that would enhance the capability to respond to stakeholders’ service needs
Candidates for organizational assessment interviews or surveys could include: board members, trustees, officers, presidents/vice presidents, executives, department/division heads, managers/employees, customers, partners, and other potential stakeholders. I will provide sample strategic planning interview questions in a future post.

The organizational assessment typically includes methods for scanning or examining the environmental factors influencing goals, objectives, and other values of or constraints upon the organization. A PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental) analysis can be used to describe macro-environmental factors. A SWOT analysis can be used to evaluate the “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats” involved in technology services. SWOT clarifies objectives and internal or external factors that positively or negatively affect achieving objectives. By matching strengths or converting threats into opportunities, strategies can be developed to account for the environment surrounding technology services. For example, during a recent planning project, a weakness was identified around customer support services for application usage issues. Several strategies proposed in the resulting plan addressed different aspects of this issue to provide enhanced capabilities for application usage support and converting this weakness into a strength for customer support services.

The organizational assessment should describe the current state of technology services operations and analyze that state against industry, business, and other applicable best practices or benchmarks to identify any gaps. Using the organizational assessment and gap analysis, planners can identify definitions, changes, or additions to strategic goals, initiatives, or strategies to be included in the plan to address unmet strategic technology needs. For instance, the definitions of goals can often be refined using this information to better follow the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting model – defining Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. These refined strategic goals will often imply changes in strategies. The modified strategic items and related assessment or analysis information will in turn be used during ensuing tactical or operational planning.

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