Corporate Planning and Strategic Management Initiatives in NSW Government Agencies
New Corporate Planning and Strategic Management Systems in NSW Government Agencies New corporate planning and strategic management systems are currently being trialed in a number of NSW Government Agencies. If introduced, these systems will tighten financial accountability, formalise a whole-of-government approach and add rigour to strategy development processes. The new systems have been initiated by NSW Government Central Agencies and build on the past requirement for agencies to demonstrate their accountability for delivering community outcomes that are consistent with both government priorities and budgetary constraints. I must stress that they are only being trialed and are not mandatory at this stage. However, they are based on two sound strategic management principles. I therefore believe that agency managers could only benefit by introducing these principles into their current processes for Corporate Planning and/or Strategic Management. The principles are the introduction of iterative links between processes for strategy development and resource allocation and the use of cross-functional strategic plans to distribute and manage these resources within the agency. The former is sound because it ensures that scarce resources flow to areas of greatest strategic need and that strategies are not developed or attempted to be implemented if they cannot be resourced. The latter is used by large organisations to ensure that particular functions are managed consistently across diverse organisational units. Strategic plans for each function (in this case human resources, physical assets and information technology) together with the Corporate Plan give direction to organisational units. Unit business plans are then required to demonstrate how they will implement the functional strategies within their unit. A Government Planning Framework has been developed jointly by Premier’s, Treasury and DPWS for the Government Asset Management committee to assist agencies to introduce these systems. It builds on the work done in developing the Total Asset Management manual (which is a system for strategically managing physical assets). If you are not familiar with Total Asset Management click here. The framework incorporates the TAM model but enhances it to include all resources, the most important of which are human resources, information technology and physical assets. It then goes on to introduce a Service and Resource Allocation Agreement as a mechanism for negotiating acquisition of these resources. This agreement will be in effect a high level Service Delivery Agreement between the agency and Treasury. Details of the Framework can be found on the GAMC website at http://www.nsw.gov.au/gamc . Managers who are not directly involved with physical assets should not be put off by the fact that the site obviously targets Asset Managers. The guidance given for Corporate Planning and the preparation of the Service Delivery Strategy applies to the whole agency and the asset management strategies will give an indication of how the other resources can be similarly managed. For more information see Strategic Planning for Improved Organisational Performance , visit the Change & Perform Website or contact Kerry Feldman My NSW government corporate planning experience Kerry Feldman