Week 7

Instructions
The process of strategic action planning (SAP) uses several steps to arrive at the final document, which is then communicated to stakeholders and publicized to employees assuring everyone in your organization has received the action plan. The SAP process includes (a) identifying issues which you completed in Week 2, (b) composing the draft strategies to address these issues in Week 3, (c) assembling and meeting with your committee to review and prioritize the top three issues identified issues you completed in Week 4. Continuing with the SAP process, in Week 5 you (d) provided your board of trustees with a report on the financial challenges with the current structure of reimbursement mechanisms, the top issue to be addressed, and in Week 6, you (e) completed an Issue Brief for each of the three top issues to be presented at a future board meeting.

The next step in the SAP process is to conduct a SWOT analysis to examine your organization’s strengths, weaknesses (internal view), opportunities, and threats (external view). From this examination, organizational goals are identified with strategies and action steps created to achieve the intended outcomes. In addition, the individual or individuals who will undertake the action steps are identified and the timeline to accomplish these activities is set.

In the final step, fiscal resources needed to accomplish the action steps and carry out the strategies are identified, whether the resources are material or human resources or both, and in which fiscal year these fiscal resources will be needed. Supporting resources in the form of marketing materials or data from the research office are identified. Activities within the strategic action plan come at a cost and must be identified to include in the budget plan.

Every action plan must be assessed during the process and at the end of the process. Assessment can be measured at intervals within the timeline to determine if a change in course is needed or additional or different resources are required to accomplish one or more of the action steps in the plan.

This week, you will conduct an organizational SWOT analysis and create your SAP for the top issue you have been working on for the last few weeks. Remember, the financial challenges with reimbursement methods is your top issue to be addressed.

The SWOT analysis of your organization in terms of the financial challenge with reimbursement mechanisms you have prioritized as the top issue will precede your creation of the SAP. A SWOT template is provided here and can be recreated in Word with tables.