Estate Living Magazine Smart Moves - Issue 38 February 2019 | Page 41

C O M M U N I T Y
• training, motivating and empowering the group to see how they
will be adding value to the community
• setting objectives, timelines, key roles and success indicators
• understanding the history of the association, how it came into
being and why it was established
• imagining and understanding multiple visions of the future,
by setting possible scenarios including size, financial position,
market expectations and the impact that the political,
environmental, social and technological environment will have
on the community
• identifying current opportunities and likely changes
• identifying things that the community does well, and what it
does badly, and measuring these against the core values of the
community
• describing a picture of the vision of the future using strengths
and opportunities, and integrating the threats and weaknesses
• describing the plan to all association members, at each phase
of the development of the plan, to solicit comments to fill gaps
where critical areas may have been missed
• restating the popularised plan, seeking broad-based consensus
for it, and soliciting more feedback and involvement
• developing operating plans, budgets and schedules
• prioritising goals and allocating and planning resource utilisation
• monitoring accomplishments, and soliciting and reaffirming
consensus on remaining items
• restarting the vision-making process with a new group of
interested members.
STRATEGIC PLANNING IN PRACTICE
Strategic planning’s three main components are plan development,
plan implementation, and plan monitoring and evaluation.
Plan development
Long-range Planning Process
Best Practices
Benchmarking
Mission
Statement
Community Needs
Short / Long term
Baseline SWOT
Where are we now?
Vision 5 to 10 years
Where do we want to be?
Details of Vision
Recycle
Gaps
Difference between
where we are and
where we want to be
Ongoing
Performance
Measures
Goals and
Objectives
Strategic Plan
How are we going to get
there?
Multi-year Budget
O
• Determine operating values, or guiding principles, that state the
association’s intentions and expectations.
• Perform a needs assessment. Determine the needs of the
association by analysing the present state of the community,
addressing any critical issues.
• Do a SWOT analysis, identifying the association’s strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Determine key performance indicators (KPI) – five to 10 areas in
which the association must be successful in order to accomplish
its mission.
• Determine customer expectations, and align them to KPIs.
• Determine critical issues that must be addressed for the
association to achieve its mission and vision, based on the SWOT
analysis.
• Define the roles of key players who will be responsible for each
aspect of the strategic plan. Answer questions such as:
» » What level of control will the board have?
» » Is the manager going to be a proactive leader or an
administrator?
» » Are the home owners going to be active as committee
members or are they going to be less involved?
• Communicate the plan to all stakeholders. Make sure that every
player has the necessary documents and basic knowledge to
perform effectively. Also, if the strategic plan calls for specific
Plan development consists of the following steps:
• Assess the association’s history, significant accomplishments
and areas that were weaknesses. List important milestones,
and include items where impact occurred in the association’s
operations, e.g. hiring additional staff, raising levies, building
additional facilities, changing some of the rules, etc.
• Assess the association’s current status, e.g. financial statements,
state of the infrastructure, demographics, perception of the
external environment, property market, number of complaints
and security breaches, traffic load, etc.
• Evaluate the association’s current governance structure.
• Examine policies, procedures, and desk guides available to
determine the chain of command within the association’s
staff, within the board, and for oversight and communications
between the staff or management company and the board of
directors.
• Develop mission and vision statements.
L I V I N G