How to Develop a Strategic Plan

Hi, I’m Ted Jackson, founder of ClearPoint Strategy. Over the past 25 years, I’ve helped hundreds of organizations, especially in government, with strategic planning and reporting. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

Government organizations face limited resources, complex stakeholder demands, and constant pressure to deliver results. With the right approach, you can still plan well. Here is how I’ve guided organizations like yours to build strategic plans that deliver results.

What Is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its direction and long-term goals, creating specific plans to achieve them, implementing those plans, and evaluating the results. Any government organization that wants to reach its long-term goals and sustain growth needs a strategic plan.

But too often, plans fail. Most government organizations flounder when it comes to developing and executing their strategy.

You can be in the small percentage that actually achieve the goals in their strategic plans. Based on our experience, we know that following this four-phase approach will significantly increase your odds of getting high-quality results. It lays out, step by step, how you’re going to reach a particular set of goals. Without this foundation, you’ll either continue on a path to nowhere, or get caught up in a tornado of urgent activities that may not actually benefit your government organization in the long term.

Get the ebook of 8 strategic planning templates

Strategic Planning: It’s Simpler Than You Think

Strategic planning comes down to four core steps:

1. Getting Organized
2. Developing the Strategic Plan
3. Executing the Plan
4. Reporting on Progress

If you get these steps right, you’ll be ahead of the curve. Too often, I see organizations stumble because they skip preparation or overcomplicate execution. Here is how I approach each step, based on decades of experience.

Step 1: Getting Organized Before You Develop a Strategic Plan

If you don’t start with a solid foundation, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. Before you write a plan, focus on these essentials:

• Assemble the Right People
  You need buy-in across your organization, and leadership has to be involved. Decision-makers must be at the table from day one. Bring in department heads and a few subject-matter experts too, so you hear different perspectives.

Another major player needed for this initial stage is the strategic planner. The strategic planner’s job is to align thoughts from the leadership team with a process the organization can use to execute on their strategy.

• Clarify Your Purpose
  Decide why you are creating this plan: to communicate progress to citizens, align internal teams, or justify a budget request. Your purpose will shape every decision you make.
• Choose a Framework
  I’ve worked with all the big ones: Balanced Scorecard, OKRs, Theory of Change. They’re all good tools, but don’t get hung up on finding the “perfect” one. Pick what feels intuitive to your team and fits your needs. This doesn’t have to be a slow, manual process. ClearPoint can instantly arrange your data into a planning framework for you.

• Gather Your Inputs
  Your plan should be rooted in data. Look at what’s working and what’s not, inside and outside the organization.
  • Internal inputs: Check whether one branch of your government agency is performing better than another. If it is, decide whether to focus more energy on the better-performing area or shift to help the underperforming areas.
  • External inputs: Outside factors may affect how efficiently your organization runs. For example, if your city just elected new officials who want to enact different policies, that could change your strategy.

This step used to be like pulling teeth. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made it much easier. ClearPoint uses AI to collect and organize data quickly.

Once you’ve gathered the quantitative data (ideally with the help of AI), get feedback from several sources.

• Talk to your leadership team and staff to gather their thoughts about the future of the organization.
• Meet with policy makers, citizens, and community leaders to see what they think your organization is doing well and what needs improvement. These suggestions could deal with anything from service offerings to organizational culture.
• Set a Realistic Timeline
  Work out a timeline for completing your strategic plan. I’ve seen plans come together in a few weeks, and I’ve seen them take months.
  The timeline depends on your organization’s experience with strategic planning, and realistic is the key word.
• If you refresh your strategic plan every year, you might be able to work through this process in 4-5 weeks.
• If you’ve never done strategic planning before, 6 months could be more realistic.

Just don’t rush it. A rushed plan is a bad plan.

Step 2: Developing a Strategic Plan

This is the fun part. With the prep work done, you can get creative and build a plan that inspires action.

• Revisit Your Mission and Vision
  If your mission and vision don’t make people sit up and pay attention, rewrite them.
  • Your mission statement explains what you do and why.
  • Your vision statement describes what your organization wants to achieve over time. It is your organization’s North Star. I like to ask leadership teams, “If you’re wildly successful in five years, what does that look like?” That’s your vision.

Where the mission is timeless, your vision is time-bound and more tangible. Two tools that will help build your mission and vision statements:

• OAS statement: OAS stands for Objective, Advantage, Scope. Talking through these concepts for your organization helps you shape a vision that is tangible and interactive. The exercise is optional. You can read more about creating your OAS statement here.
• Strategic shifts: A second tool some people find helpful is Strategic Shifts: exercises that help the leadership team define today’s strategic priorities vs. tomorrow’s. For example, your leadership team may say, “We want to shift from central control to autonomy when it comes to our decision-making capability.” If the whole team agrees on these shifts, defining your objectives, measures, and projects gets much easier.

If you’ve already created mission and vision statements, confirm that both are aligned with your current strategy before proceeding to the next step.

• Set Goals, KPIs, and Projects

Your strategic plan needs clear goals and tangible ways to reach them.

Here’s the formula I swear by:

• Goals are your big-picture objectives.
• KPIs tell you if you’re hitting those goals.
• Projects are the actions that move the needle toward your goals.

For example:

• Goal: Improve public safety.
• KPI: Reduce crime rates by 10% in two years.
• Project: Launch a community policing program.

Link KPIs directly to your strategic goals so they measure progress toward the outcomes you want. Good strategic plans use 5-7 KPIs to manage and track progress against goals. Don’t confuse KPIs with other traditional metrics: read more about that here.

• Visualize Your Plan

People need to see how everything connects. A strategy map (shown in the example below) works well for this. You could also use icons or color coding to show how the elements of your strategy work together.

With ClearPoint, you can build these maps in minutes, showing how your goals, KPIs, and projects align.

“I learned the importance of aligning your processes and system, and being systematic across the board [in relation to strategic planning].”
De'Kisha Fondon
Senior Budget & Performance Analyst
The City of Germantown, Tennessee

Step 3: Executing the Plan

Many organizations falter here. A plan isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if you don’t execute it. You likely need someone from the Office of Strategy Management to make sure the plan is properly “loaded” in these ways:

• Assign Clear Responsibilities
  Every goal, KPI, and project needs an owner. When accountability is vague, execution falls apart.
• Communicate Relentlessly
  Your team can’t support a plan they don’t understand. Make it your mission to over-communicate.
  • Internal: Keep all elements of your strategy, like strategy maps or logic models, in a larger strategic plan document. (If you use strategy software, the strategic plan document will likely be contained there.) To check that your leadership team grasps the strategy, give each of them a copy of this document and make sure they can describe the strategy easily to someone who wasn’t involved in the creation process. More broadly, the strategy must be communicated throughout your organization. I always recommend an internal “roadshow” to explain the plan to staff at every level. People won’t give it a passing thought unless you engage them, so charge every department head with explaining how their team fits into the strategy and why it matters.
  • External: You also need a plan for communicating your strategy outside the organization, with local policy makers, community partners, and constituents. Think through how it will be shared, and which parts of it are relevant to outside parties.
• Align Resources
  Budgets should reflect your priorities. In the short term, such as your next budgeting cycle, structure the budget around the key components of your strategy. Tie how you allocate resources directly to how those efforts support your strategy. If your spending isn’t aligned with your strategy, it’s time to make tough choices. Over time, the areas that contribute less directly to strategic goals will become clear, and you can work on gradually aligning everything you fund.
• Empower Your Teams
  Give your people the tools they need to succeed. I’ve seen organizations make incredible progress simply by holding quarterly check-ins and providing clear expectations.

“[Since implementing the strategic plan], there's been more of a collaborative effort. We've seen better communication between departments, a stronger partnership with the county, and more opportunities to engage with our residents."
Jay Reinstein
Strategic Plan Project Manager
The City of Durham, North Carolina

Step 4: Reporting on Progress

Organizations either soar or stumble at this step. Reporting is about learning and adapting as much as accountability.

• Set a Reporting Cadence
  Start simple. If you’re new to strategic planning, go quarterly. If you are more experienced, try monthly. The key is consistency. At a minimum, you should be reporting on your entire strategy on a quarterly basis or breaking down your strategy into pieces and reporting on one of those pieces each month.
• Structure Your Reports
  Your reports should answer three questions:
  1. What’s working?
  2. What’s not?
  3. What’s next?
  Your report should highlight progress on your measures and projects, and how those link to your objectives. The point is to show how all these elements fit together and relate to the strategic plan as a whole. ClearPoint automates much of this, so you’re not buried in spreadsheets and manual updates.
• Engage Stakeholders
  Share your progress with leadership, staff, and even residents. Transparency builds trust and accountability. Your reporting meetings should revolve around three key issues:
  • What is your government organization trying to accomplish? This may include reiterating your mission and vision to add context around the conversation.
  • Are you making progress toward these goals? You might review key metrics and the status of initiatives and milestones.
  • What actions need to be taken to continue making progress? If metrics are off-track, for example, what can be done to get back on course.

Encourage candid dialogue and make sure the discussion stays focused.

Pro tip:
You may want a facilitator for the first few meetings, and you may want to script a few open discussions where a goal owner explains why they are behind schedule (red) on their goal, and the manager offers support, not criticism. This sets the tone you need for everyone to start reporting honestly and working together to achieve the organization’s goals.

"Aligning a preliminary strategic plan with developing the vision plan has to be iterative. We update as we go, but we're also being very systematic about it, making sure that community priorities are reflected."
Amy Knowles
Assistant to the City Manager for Structural Innovation
The City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Modern Strategic Planning with ClearPoint

Technology has changed strategic planning. What used to take months can now be done in days.

At ClearPoint, we’ve built tools that tackle the toughest parts of developing a strategic plan:

• AI-Powered Drafts: Upload your inputs, and our AI Assistant creates a plan draft in minutes.
• Automated Reporting: Workflows, calculations, and templates make reporting easier.
• Integrated Execution Tools: Align projects, KPIs, and budgets in one place.

You save time, 89 hours per report on average, and can focus on driving impact.

Let’s Make Your Strategy Work

I’ve spent my career helping organizations like yours turn strategic plans into reality. If you’re tired of the same old frustrations, let’s talk. ClearPoint can help you take the pain out of planning, execution, and reporting.

Book a Demo Today