Notes from Your Strategic Planning Office

Google the term "Strategic Planning Office" and see what you find on the first few pages. Military, state and local government agencies, cities, universities, and more. Each of these organizations has a Strategic Planning Office (SPO) whose sole purpose is to facilitate, create and manage the strategic planning and implementation process.

The SPO is an interesting concept when you think about it. Its existence is based on a vision of strategic planning as an ongoing function that has its own raison d'etre, like any other department in an organization. The SPO serves the organization and all of its departments in the same way that, for example, an Information Technology department does. IT has no reason to be, save for serving the information management needs of the core business functions. The SPO acts as a specialized support organization within the organization to care and feed the strategic planning process.

Take a look at some of the links you see on the google search. The sophistication of the SPOs vary significantly where, in some cases, the SPO is not really an "O" (office) at all, but rather an ad hoc committee. (University of Iowa) In others, there may be two people who work in the office of the president or provost of a university. (UNM) At Stanford Medical School, there are six full time team members and at University of Sydney, there are sixteen. What do these people do?

The SPO fills in the gaps most commonly left unaddressed by organizations that do create formal strategic plans. The major areas they address include: research, facilitation, advice and consultancy to leadership, metrics data collection and statistical analysis. These are many of the areas which, when they are either assumed, or are dealt with on an ad hoc basis, lead to failure of strategic planning efforts in less sophisticated organizations.

This blog shares ideas about strategic planning from the point of view of an outside Strategic Planning Office, specifically Strategic Scenarios, LLC. which operates as an external SPO for organizations who do not have the internal capacity to conduct these functions in house on a full time basis, yet which see a need for strategic planning that actually gets executed, resulting in the ongoing strategic advantage of the firm.