It’s that time again, it comes around every so often when I need to write a strategy for the service, the highest level of document that will describe what it is we are trying to achieve over the coming years. It should be quite easy to write but then you have to take into account the very differing audiences that you hope will end up reading it. Is the strategy aimed at our customers and how the service fits into their needs or is it aimed at the service itself and the employee’s role in delivering it? In a political organisation is it aimed at the councillors themselves to describe how the strategy will underpin their ambition or aimed at the senior officers who will deliver against these political drivers? Perhaps I can write it to be read in all four ways or will that make it too ambiguous or the opposite, overly complicated?
Never mind, that can come later as at this stage I have a more pressing question. Where do I start?
I already have the previous strategy which has been serving us for the last two years and it might be a good idea to take that document and unpick it. I could take the things that worked well out of it and add new bits to make it fresh. This would have the advantage of not having to write out everything from scratch, I would already have a template and there would be a familiar resonance to it all in my audience (which ever one I am referring to). Then again, this feels a bit like cheating, a re-hash of stale ideas, unoriginal and regurgitated. Have we not moved on since the current strategy?
Perhaps I could start by holding some sessions with the service team to find out what they liked about the existing document and what they didn’t, what worked well and what could be improved upon. This would give me good buy in from my own team and create a real sense of ownership in the final outcome. On the other hand they might wonder what I am up to, it might look as if I have run out of ideas and need to come running to them for theirs. What if I don’t like their thoughts? What if they don’t fit in with the way that I think that the market is going and how the service should support it? What if there are too many opinions within the service to make something coherent?
How about if I start with the customers then, they would certainly appreciate being involved, being consulted especially at such an early stage in the process, wouldn’t they? It would give them a chance to have their say, a chance to help shape the service to meet their future needs. Surely though they would expect me to at least go to them with something, some clear ideas about how I see the service delivering against their outcomes, some clear reflection of my understanding of their trials and tribulations? Yes I’m certain they would. They are going to want to feel confident that I know what I’m doing and going empty handed just won’t work.
Then again I could try typing ‘ICT strategy’ into a search engine and see what pops out. There might well be some good ideas that I could plagiarise, after all why re-invent the wheel? People are writing this kind of stuff all of the time and I’m sure that there are some great documents ready to cut and paste. But that would really be cheating, it would be someone else’s work and wouldn’t have much relevance to what we are trying to achieve. By the time I had messed around it with it to look like something useful it would be so different I might as well have started from scratch, in fact I might as well have asked somebody else to write it.
No, it’s no good, I know what I am going to have to do. I’m going to do what I always do in these situations, gather a few good ideas, lock myself away on a quiet room in front of my laptop and sweat over every word through shear hard graft until I have something that remotely resembles the bones of a strategy. Then I can do my consulting, tweak it here and there, flesh it out and build a consensus around the new strategy. There’s no other way to approach it.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 