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Once the gold standard of public sector strategy, the 5-year plan is increasingly out of step with today’s fast-moving world.
Once the cornerstone of public sector strategy, the traditional 5-year plan is now struggling to stay relevant. We recently listened to strategy conversations from state agencies, public utilities, and local governments—and while the org charts looked different, the story was the same:
The way we plan, manage, and report on strategy isn’t keeping up with the pace of change.
Basically, these strategic plans that are meant to be your north star for the next 5 years are often outdated before they’re even approved.
From fractured reporting systems to a lack of real-time insights that make it difficult to remain agile, here’s what we heard when we scanned nearly 900 Gong calls—and what it signals about the future of strategic planning.
1. Strategy moves quarterly. Why doesn’t your plan?
Five-year plans are great for big vision. But when your reporting cycle is quarterly — and the world changes faster than your org chart — long-range planning without short-term agility just creates drag.
Too many organizations build beautiful 5-year frameworks, then scramble every quarter to retrofit them into actual reports. Real-world strategy moves in 90-day increments. If your software, process, or culture isn’t built for that pace, your plan becomes shelf-ware.
The Takeaway: Tie your long-term plan to short-term rhythms. Align review meeting with how often decisions get made.
2. Manual processes are the bottleneck.
Excel and PowerPoint are good at many things — running your strategy isn’t one of them. They’re fragile, slow, and prone to “Oops, I updated the wrong version.”
One call with a public utility captured this pain perfectly:
“We’re managing the strategic plan with Excel, Power BI, Word docs, and SharePoint. It’s a mess. People are frustrated—not because they hate the plan, but because the update process is painful.”
Leaders are stuck validating data instead of analyzing it. Duplicate efforts, disparate systems, and cross-checking updates by hand are making teams less efficient — and heaven help the person trying to aggregate it all into a coherent report.
The Takeaway: Stop duct-taping strategy together. Invest in a system that makes updates easy, reliable, and centralized.
3. Flexibility isn’t a “nice-to-have"—it’s survival.
Flexibility is an essential part of remaining agile. It's about managing all the moving parts—from different departments, different types of plans, and different reporting cadences.
This fragmentation is what kills agility. When strategy lives in silos—operations in spreadsheets, risk in Word docs, and budgets in email threads—you can’t pivot. You can’t align. And you definitely can’t make decisions in real time.
A department of public transportation hit the nail on the head:
“Each division manages projects differently. A year from now, I’d want all strategic plans, operating plans, and risk mitigation plans in one flexible and automated system.”
The Takeaway: Modern teams need flexible platforms that bring together all types of plans—and let departments work the way they need to.
4. Transparency is more than a once-a-year activity.
When it comes to transparency, whether that’s internal or external, an update once a year simply isn’t going to cut it.
In fact, for most public sector orgs, to truly maintain trust and transparency, regular updates need to be shared with 4 different types of stakeholders:
- A full version for staff tracking
- A one-pager for the executive team
- A polished report for the board or public
- A filter-heavy version for budget or risk analysis
A city manager we spoke with understands the pressure for transparency all too well:
“Our leaders want dashboards. Our commission wants transparency. Our staff wants clarity. And right now, we’re not giving any of them what they need.”
And too often? Each version gets built from scratch. That’s time wasted, trust eroded, and inconsistencies introduced.
The Takeaway: you need one source of truth and flexible outputs that adapt to your audience—not the other way around.
Do you have a public dashboard? See how you can they can transform trust and transparency.
🚨 So… Is the 5-Year Plan Dead?
Yes. If it still means:
- Static documents built in silos
- Quarterly fire drills to collect updates
- PowerPoint decks that are outdated on delivery
- Redundant manual entry across departments
- A complete lack of visibility
But no—if it means: a focused vision, aligned objectives, and measurable progress, where:
- Plans aren’t static—they’re rolling
- Reporting is automated, and insights are in real-time
- Flexibility, visibility and agility are built-in
- Transparency is second nature
Long-term strategy isn’t dead. But it looks different now.
🧭 What’s Next?
A clear pattern is emerging: Strategic horizons are shrinking, and agile, real-time planning is now the priority.
We asked each organization: What would success look like, one year from now?
- A unified, living system for strategy, operations, and risk
- Department heads being able to provide quick, automated updates
- Leaders trusting the dashboards and making faster decisions
- Residents seeing real results—without downloading a PDF
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