Your Questions Answered – Strategy
At the GIS Managers Summit in July, attendees were able to submit questions for our live panel. While we had some great answers, there were dozens of questions we didn’t have time for, so we’re going to answer them here!
Our panelists will be posting, Q&A-style, over the next several weeks, so check back here regularly!
This week, @JamesPardue2 (Jim) answered questions about strategy:
Q: How often should a strategy/strategic plan be revised?
A: It should be reviewed for revision annually. In our approach to developing and implementing a strategy we speak about the four phases, Understand, Plan, Act, and Revisit.
It is in the revisit phase that we should make any adjustments or changes that have impacted the strategy. I suggest that strategies be developed for no longer than three years. They can be shorter, however. At the end of the three years, determine:
- What got accomplished
- What did not
- Why it was not achievable
- Decide if the strategy needs to be updated with a new vision, focus, goals, and business needs for the next 12-18 months or if a brand-new strategy needs to be developed from scratch for the next three years.
Q: What is the best approach when trying to realign/revise the Geospatial Strategy of an organization that was created by a predecessor?
A: Conduct a triage assessment on it and consider the following:
- Is it still aligned?
- Is the vision statement still valid?
- Are the goals still valid and achievable?
- What else has changed that may impact it i.e., new mission, new CEO/Director, loss of key critical personnel?
- Are business needs still legitimate?
- Was it being implemented successfully?
- Are the initiatives still valid and the prioritization of those initiatives still good?
If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then modify what needs adjusting and continue with implementing the current strategy. If the answer to most of these questions is no, then consider developing a brand-new strategy.
Q: Do you all see value in a scale of strategies over time? Meaning implementing a small-scale strategy or a condensed one, prior to building a more robust strategy.
A: Absolutely. Here are several scenarios:
- The first is an organization that is just starting on their geospatial journey and has recently implemented a new GIS Enterprise. While they currently do not possess the geospatial maturity to conduct a full strategy now, they decided to develop an 18th month strategy to build the foundation for their new GIS program. They develop a short-term vision, several goals around initial governance, data standards, workforce training and development, and creating a few initial key capabilities. They also determine initial business needs and layout some prioritized initiatives that focus on the entire organization versus individual departments. This gets all the resources (think people, process and technology) aligned on the same mission, building a strong foundation out the gate. After the strategy is completed, they embark on a three-year strategy that considers the various business unit’s goals, business needs, and challenges while revising a new vision, goals, etc.
- The second scenario is an organization that wants a strategy to get GIS back on track and aligned with the business/mission. Here key leaders meet (CTO, CIO, CDO and the GIS Lead) to come together and create a 12-24 month strategy that charts the new path forward to make GIS an enterprise solution and relaunch it as a key component to providing business solution to overcome challenges. When that strategy has run its course, the organization now has a model for success and develops a larger strategy that considers numerous business units and functions.
- I’ve also seen a phased approach whereas year one we build the strategy around five departments, year two we roll in another five, year three etc.
- There is also nothing wrong with a department within a city, such as public safety, health, or parks and services, to build their own strategy and then it can be rolled up into the City’s strategy later.
Q: How do you bridge Geospatial Strategy at the various stratification of the organization?
A: This is a great question. The answer is alignment. It is totally fine for all three of the entities used in your example to have separate strategies. They must however be aligned in supporting the higher organizational mission, focus, and priorities. Any misalignment will cause resources to compete and be pulled in different directions. Prioritization is also key. A determination needs to be made to work on those initiatives first that impact the most and provide the largest benefit to the entire organization, no matter what strategy tier it sits at.
Q: How would you simultaneously promote Geospatial strategies from a top-down perspective for executives while also bringing the technology to those on the bottom such as field operators /crews?
A: Another good question. In one word, engagement. You promote a top-down perspective by including executives in the process of developing the strategy, by engaging with them. Set up a series of one-on-one short meetings with them to take only20-minutes of their time. Ask them specific questions regarding their opinion where they see GIS providing value to the organization over the next few years. Ask them what keeps them up at night, their biggest worries about the organization. Ask them what geospatial solution would make their jobs easier. Send them a read ahead of the questions before you meet with them, get on their calendars, be brief and direct with your questions.
For the field operators and crews, engage with them as well. Pull them into a group meeting as well and if they are not utilizing GIS, show them examples of what location technology can do to make their jobs and workflows easier. Obtain their input on how they think it can be leverage and what they would like to see created in the future. Ask them what their day-to-day pain points and data challenges are.
Q: How do you strategize priorities when there are too many?
A: Develop a method for prioritization and consider some type of governance committee to make the decisions on what is the priority. Consider using a prioritization matrix or scoring system to determine the level of effort needed and the value that something brings to the organization as a whole. A good example is the 2x2 prioritization matrix.
Q: What would you suggest I do if my org does not have stated goals and objectives?
A: Initially I would start with identifying what the high-level goals are of the organization itself. The determine how is GIS currently supporting the process of achieving those goals.
Next, put together a group of GIS stakeholders and sponsors and either interview them or schedule a brainstorming working group session to discuss identifying up to five long term geospatial goals of the organization's GIS program. Then take each goal and brainstorm what the objectives are for each goal in order to achieve success of that goal. Lastly, determine what are the challenges in achieving each goal and objectives and identify what can be done proactively to combat each challenge.
Q: What is an average appropriate length of a successful strategy? Easy to be too wordy or too short to be engaging with an array of participants.
A: That determines if we are talking about the development of a strategy or the implementation of the strategy. It can take 1-3 months to develop a strategy depending on whether it is a high-level strategy or a detailed one that includes business units. If it includes business units, then how many are important and impacts the time to develop it. For implementation, I recommend developing a strategy that is no longer than three years. COVID taught us a valuable lesson, just about every organization that had a strategy that year, had to revise it within a year to stay the course of an obtainable vision. Plus, when it comes to all things technology, beyond three years, things can be overtaken by technological advancements and new ways of doing things.
As for the length of the output document, the shorter the better. Last week I reviewed an organization’s strategy, and it was comprised of 256 typed pages in a word document. Not a lot of people will read a 256-page strategy, particularly executives. That’s why it is key to use a strategy canvas template to note the key and important points of your strategy into a single page summary that executives and leaders can read quickly and grasp the concept in a few minutes. Even when we develop strategies that end up being over 100 slides, we create a condensed summary for executives. That is what makes the Geospatial Strategy StoryMap example such a great tool. To also learn more about the strategy on a page concept, read Matt Lewin’s (from Esri Canada) article on the topic.
Q: If your "GIS champions" keep finding new jobs, how should one pivot to adapt and keep things progressing?
A: Two options here. Either you become the GIS champion, or you have multiple GIS champions spread across the organization. Another approach is to take the major things you are trying to accomplish with your strategy, create working groups to accomplish them, have designated “champion” of that effort and an alternative. If the champion leaves, you still have a group working the effort and you can always designate a new champion from within the working group.