Pausing to reflect back on times when strategic planning where I worked had not been formally or openly done, I can see that, like Cheryl, I operated according to a strategic plan of my own. For this reason alone, a strategic plan for the organisation is beneficial; people running branches or departments will operate on some sense of what is important, and while these plans and ideas may be sensible, they will not necessarily be a complete fit with the overarching goals of the organisation.
Now that I have worked with strategic planning, I would not like working without a strategic plan because I would feel as if I were making it up as I go along. Strategic planning in our organisation is treated seriously. In our library we create team plans from the strategic plan and then individual performance plans link into the team plans. In practice this is trickier than it sounds, but it does mean you have to think carefully about what your priorities and goals are in a given timeframe.
I have worked in libraries where there was no evident plan and experienced exactly what Pippa mentions - demoralised staff, a reactionary work environment where everything assumes the sames importance (e.g. a project to curtail notetaking in library books took as much staff time to explore and plan as did re-organising the furniture to provide a safe path through the library for disabled borrowers), and a sense of things just going along in the same way all the time. I can already hear the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" cry go up, but strategic planning is more about things not getting 'broken' in the first place. One common factor in such organisations is that employees can become risk averse. If something a little different seems to be needed or is suggested, it doesn't get traction because no-one is sure if that's what they are supposed to do. Instead they do the same as before because so far no-one has said not to.
Of course a lot of what happens day to day in the library is perfectly rational and effective service that will continue over the forseeable future. The strategic element is more about looking more broadly and a little into the future: what do the demographics in your area tell you about the needs of the community now and in the next 5 years? What are the council's or university's main aims in the medium term? The strategic plan says 'The library understands these aims and this is what we are doing to work towards them.' From this platform you are able to quantify what resources are required to achieve these goals.
In the examples where the strategic plan is so broad that your team or branch activities are not really discernible, I would encourage you to draw up a plan of your own and run it by your manager. In response to fairly general goals in our plan (e.g. 'participate in bicultural reference service design and provision'), I now also write a 3 monthly plan of action for my team. The benefit of this is that the team are fully aware of what work is on the horizon and when it should start and be finished by, and we can see exactly how our activities fit into the strategic plan for the team, the department and the library.
And the beauty of it is you can then look back and say "This is what we aimed to do and this is what we did. We achieved our goals which means we helped achieve the goal of the city/university/company". Good for morale and great for getting more of what you need!
Charlotte Clements
