What’s Your Master Plan?

Strategic Planning—it’s not just for businesses

• Raphael M. Barishansky
• Law Officer Volume 5 Issue 8
• 2009 Aug 1

Business experts have long considered strategic planning a necessary tool for success, but law enforcement agencies should also develop and implement meaningful strategic plans.

Strategic planning is rooted in future-oriented, proactive thinking that anticipates change and adopts long-term strategies to meet the demands of that change. In other words, it’s a “master plan” for your law enforcement agency. It’s also a management tool that will help your organization focus its energies appropriately.

Note: A strategy defines patterns of objectives, purposes or goals, and major policies for achieving those goals, and a strategic plan is a document that determines the needs of an organization that will enable it to realize its vision and mission.

Increasing demands on public safety entities as well as ever-changing technological and political environments challenge all law enforcement agencies. A well-thought out strategic plan developed with input from all levels of your organization may be the thing that allows your service to thrive in challenging times.

A strategic plan can also provide overall direction to an organization or specific direction in such areas as financial strategies (planning for financial ups and downs), human resource/organizational development strategies (understanding the nature of the workforce), information technology deployments (including the advent of broadband wireless communications) and marketing/public education strategies.

Strategic planning should seek to answer four fundamental questions:

1. Where are we going (defined by mission and vision statements)?
2. How do we get there (defined by specific goals)?
3. What is our blueprint for action (the action steps for achieving the goals)?
4. How do we know if we are on track (assessment and revision)?

Depending on your agency’s needs, specific situation and time frames, you may want to develop short- and/or long-term strategic plans. You also will want to determine objectives to reach those goals, which can be immediate (to be accomplished within one year), short term (two to five years) and long term (more than three years to initiate and fewer than 10 years to complete). Regardless of the duration, the scope of this forecasting should focus on multiple facets of your agency, including, but not limited to, finance, personnel, logistics, operations and administration.

Conduct a S-W-O-T Analysis
Sometimes referred to as a S-W-O-T (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, a situational analysis allows you to take a hard look at the current state of your law enforcement agency, as well as the factors that have the potential to change that state. It’s an examination of the internal—in the form of strengths and weaknesses—and external—in the form of opportunities and threats—forces that have a potential impact on your organization.

As the name implies, a S-W-O-T analysis requires the agency to ask some tough questions of itself, such as: Who are you? Where are you right now? Where do want to be? Can you actually get there? How can you achieve it? And how do you start the strategic planning process?

All members of your team should be a part of the S-W-O-T analysis—from line or field personnel to super­visory and management personnel and on up to the executive level. This ensures that all perspectives are considered and that the process reflects the organization as a whole.

Law-enforcement-specific examples of S-W-O-T could include:

Strengths:

• Dedicated, professional staff, both sworn and civilian.
• Strong community partnerships.
• Clear mission statement to guide the department.
• Professional public image (based on recent community survey results).
• Established and proven training program for new officers, police trainers and new drug crime investigators.
• New testing process for police officer positions and thorough background investigations for officer candidates.
• High officer retention rate.
• Young, ambitious, energetic work force eager to learn and improve.

Weaknesses:

• Police headquarters old (outdated, lacks adequate space and isn’t secure).
• Inadequate training budget.
• Inability to reach authorized staffing levels, due in part to lengthy hiring process.
• Difficulty recruiting minority officers.
• Continued need to improve intradepartment communications between policing areas.
• Budget doesn’t support operations for adequate project overtime, training or equipment.
• Lack of training opportunities due to lack of funds, time and staffing.
• Need for additional sworn and civilian staff.

Opportunities:

• Share/consolidate services with other jurisdictions, county or region.
• Reestablish the juvenile bureau to effect change on youth.
• Expand precinct desk hours to provide better customer service.
• Establish a citizen’s review process for dealing with police complaints.
• Further diversify the department work force by working with our minority partners and actively recruiting minority candidates.
• Strong community support to allow the department to increase funding, staffing and upgrade facilities.
• Opportunity to educate the public.
• Expanded recruitment efforts to attract candidates outside the region.
• Continued exploration of technologies to maximize departmental efficiency (e.g., cameras, crime view, field-based reporting).
• Ability to reinvent the department culture, image, business practices and professionalism.
• Opportunity to leverage other community partners/resources—private and public, nonprofit—for greater problem solving.

Threats:

• Building security is severely lacking compared with modern police facilities.
• Limited overtime budget limits departmental ability to staff, train or provide consistent level of service.
• Staffing hasn’t kept pace with increased work load.
• Distrust from the minority community.
• The need to compete for other city resources has the potential to disrupt departmental priorities.
• Lack of preparedness for a medium- or large-scale civil disturbance.
• Loss of experienced officers within the next three to five years.
• Lack of capital investment to improve operations (e.g., facility, technology, equipment).

Define Your Mission
Well-researched and well-written mission and vision statements are the next integral parts of your agency’s strategic plan.

A mission statement defines the agency’s “business,” its overarching objectives and its approach to reach those objectives, but a mission statement does not prescribe the means for reaching those objectives. An effective mission statement:

• Is short and sharply focused;
• Is clear and easily understood;
• Is sufficiently broad;
• Defines why you do what you do (why the organization exists);
• Provides direction for doing the right things;
• Identifies opportunities;
• Matches organizational competence;
• Inspires commitment; and
• Says what you want to be remembered for.

An example of an effective mission statement comes from the San Francisco (Calif.) Police Department which states: 

“We, the members of the San Francisco Police Department, are committed to excellence in law enforcement and are dedicated to the people, traditions and diversity of our city. In order to protect life and property, prevent crime and reduce the fear of crime, we will provide service with understanding, response with compassion, performance with integrity and law enforcement with vision.”

Define Your Vision
Once you have developed a mission statement to define the business of your specific organization, you should create a vision statement to describe your organization’s desired 
future position. To be effective, a vision statement should:

• Paint a vivid and clear picture;
• Describe a bright future (hope);
• Be memorable and engaging in expression;
• Establish realistic and achievable aspirations; and
• Align with stated organizational values and culture.

An example of a vision statement that encompasses all of the points mentioned above comes from the Palm Bay (Fla.) Police Department in their vision statement which states:

“United in a spirit of teamwork, the Palm Bay Police Department will be an open, friendly, and community-minded organization devoted to quality public service, unyielding in purpose and dedicated to live by values reflecting a genuine desire to care for the safety and well-being of the public.”

Set Your Goals, Plans & Tactics
Your goals need to be accurately stated, relevant and well researched. For example, if your goal is to maintain competent staff to ensure the delivery of quality service to the community, you’d want to include a statement in your plan stating that your department has a goal of maintaining appropriate staffing levels to ensure delivery of quality services to the community.

To address strategic issues and develop deliberate strategies for achieving your mission, develop strategic goals, action plans and tactics during the strategic planning stage. Strategic goals provide the milestones that the law enforcement agency aims to achieve that evolve from the strategic issues. Goals should be specific, measurable, agreed upon and realistic and include estimates of the time and cost involved (i.e., SMART). Action plans define how you get to where you want to go (i.e., the steps required to reach your strategic goals). Tactics are specific actions you plan to use to implement the strategic plans and achieve strategic goals.

Remember: A strategic plan isn’t a laundry list of goals, but rather should reflect the priorities of those who participate in the planning process.

The most useful plans are succinct and easily translated into useful measures. Including too many goals can cause your organization to become overwhelmed with minutia. Bear in mind that just one recommendation can translate into a number of broad goals made up of multiple objectives.

Objectives are specific, measurable results produced by implementing strategies to make your vision a reality. During the process of identifying objectives, keep asking, “Are these objectives obtainable?” Don’t set yourself up for failure by establishing unrealistic expectations.

To meet those objectives, you need to set specific time lines (e.g., one week, one month, three months, a year) in which you expect to accomplish each one. Again, be realistic about your organization’s ability to meet the expectation in those time frames.

To ensure everyone keeps the plan in mind, integrate your current year’s objectives as performance criteria into the job description and the performance review of each “implementer.”

Remember: Objectives and their time lines are only guidelines, not rules set in stone. A strategic plan should allow for flexibility. However, it should not allow deviations without good reason and without an explanation of how a deviation will affect the plan’s end goals.

Action Plans/Work Plans
Now you need plans to specify the actions needed to address each of the top organizational issues and to reach each of the associated goals. These action or work plans specify the responsibilities of individuals in the organization for completing each component and the timelines in which they should accomplish them. To begin, upper level management must:

• Develop an overall executive action plan that describes how each strategic goal will be reached. The format of that plan will depend on the nature and needs of your organization.
• Develop an action plan for each major function in the organization (e.g., operations, special operations, investigations, internal affairs and administration) and for each program within the organization. In each of these plans, identify its relationship to the organization’s executive action plan.
• Ensure that each manager (and, ideally, each employee) has an action plan that contributes to the executive plan. Again, specify the relationship of these action plans to the organization’s overall executive action plan. These plans constitute the step-by-step playbook by which each major function will realize its part of the plan and by which your organization will reach the objectives described in your master plan.

The plan for the organization, each major function, each manager and each employee might specify:

• The goals or objectives they should accomplish;
• Time lines for each objective or goal;
• How those results or objectives will be achieved;
• How each goal contributes to the overall strategic plan; and
• Objectives that must be reached to attain the organization’s ultimate goal.

Implement Your Plan
One of the trickiest segue points in the process is the shift in focus from writing a strategic plan to actual implementation of the various components of the strategic plan within an organization. The failure to build a bridge between the strategic planning process and the implementation processes is a critical mistake and the major reason most strategic plans don’t work.

If a strategic plan fails, the culprit is usually an inappropriate strategy or poor implementation.

Inappropriate strategies may arise due to:

• Failure to correctly define objectives;
• Lack of creativity in identifying possible strategies;
• Strategies incapable of obtaining the desired objective; or
• Poor fit between the external environment and organizational resources.

Poor implementation of a strategic plan may be due to:

• Overestimation of resources and abilities;
• Failure to coordinate;
• Overall resistance;
• Underestimation of time, personnel or financial requirements;
• Failure to follow the plan; or
• Failure to update the plan when necessary.

Keys to Success
To avoid those dangers and ensure success, your strategic plan should be:

• Realistic: Continue asking planning participants, “Can you really do this?” Don’t set your organization up for failure by asking for the impossible.
• Inclusionary: It’s critical to involve representatives of all sectors that will be affected by the plan as early in the process as possible. This includes field officers, supervisors, management and upper levels of leadership. Failure to do so will almost assuredly significantly stall, or even prevent, successful implementation.
• Incorporated: Translate your strategic plan’s actions into job descriptions and personnel performance reviews. Weaving the plan’s expectations into the very fabric of your agency will prevent employees from viewing it as simply one more management technique to ignore.
• Nurtured: A strategic plan is a living body of work that requires care, attention and constant review, and, if necessary, revision. Employees at all levels should be a part of the creation of and regularly see all or part of this plan. Don’t make the common mistake of putting your strategic plan on an executive’s shelf to be admired.

Remember: A strategic plan is not a “quick fix,” a substitute for the judgment of an agency’s leadership, created by an independent decision-maker, a predictor of the future or set in stone.

Conclusion
Strategic plans all too frequently end up collecting dust on a shelf or become irrelevant by the time they are completed. Law enforcement agency leadership, which generally is responsible for time- and resource-starved entities, can’t afford to waste efforts on strategic plans that aren’t properly nurtured and implemented.

On the other hand, a law enforcement entity that does the proper planning and implementation and works to keep its strategic plan healthy and relevant will be rewarded with a good tool to keep the organization strong, prosperous and ready to meet whatever challenges the future brings.

References

1. www.sfgov.org/site/police. Accessed April 3, 2009.
2. palmbayflorida.org/police/index.html. Accessed April 3, 2009.

Raphael M. Barishansky, MPH, is the chief of public health preparedness for the Prince George’s County (Md.) Health Department and a frequent contributor to various public safety publications. Contact him at rbarishansky@gmail.com.

• 

• Law Officer Magazine Volume 5 Issue 8

  ·Copyright © Elsevier Inc., a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy.

  SUBSCRIBE to LawOfficer NOW»