Assess the State of Your Strategic Plan

摘要

In the fall of 2000 the director of the University Libraries of Notre Dame learned that the university would begina campuswide strategic planning effort the next academicyear. I had recently joined the library from a managementconsulting firm specializing in strategic planning and hadalready expressed my interest. The director and I agreedthat we should assess the state of the library’s planning inorder to prepare for the university-wide effort. She askedme to form a task force to investigate library documentsthat might be relevant, to assess whether or not there wasa discernible strategic plan, and to present the findings. Inits two and a half months of existence, the Task Force onCommunicating the Goals and Directions of the UniversityLibraries did not engage in strategic planning, but it didthoroughly assess the state of the library’s planning. Thestrength of the assessment was that it was done outside ofa planning process. Because of our success, I am convincedthat your organization should take a moment to assess thedocuments you have written in order to determine whereyou already are. This should be done before you begin astrategic planning process.