December 15, 2020
Best Practices, Strategic Plan, Tips
Many of the clients we work with have a Strategic Plan document. However, throughout the year it can easily be forgotten about among other priorities. Strategic planning is a great exercise to think about the future of your organization—where you would like to be and what your goals are to get there. Here are five ways to help improve your strategic planning process.
Need help developing or applying your organization’s Strategic Plan? We can help! Contact us to learn more!
May 15, 2020
Communications, KAI Partners, Risk Assessment, Sacramento, Strategic Plan
By Stephen Alfano, PMP®, CSM, Prosci
There is no sure-fire way of predicting when (or how) a crisis will occur in an organization or a business environment. Crises, by their very nature, are all too often unpredictable and all-consuming events.
However, with the practice of risk management, organizations and business leaders can assess potential crises and quantify their ensuing impact. More important, they can use the assessments to create mitigation plans to prepare for potential emergencies.
One such mitigation plan is preparing a crisis communications plan.
A crisis communications plan provides a framework for timely and clear messaging from when the crisis hits through its evolution. A crisis communications plan often extends well beyond the end of the crisis to ensure that everything and everyone is on the same page or narrative. Like most proactive business management strategies, crisis communications plans fall into categories that mirror the most critical operations and functional areas.
Pre-crises Phase
Step 1: Identify Potential Crises Risk
Step 2: Designate and Educate Potential Crises Risk Owners and Spokespeople
Step 3: Standup Notifications and Monitoring Systems
Step 4: Test Response Regularly
Post-crises Phase
Step 5: Assess the Situation
Step 6: Create and Rollout Key Messaging
Step 7: Wind down/Wrap up Response as Quickly as Possible
Step 8: Perform Postmortem of Response Steps
Step 9: Revise Plans with Postmortem Insight
For more insight into Crisis Communications, check out these links:
Your Survival Guide to Crisis Communication – HubSpot
3 Best Practices For An Effective Response Plan – Business 2 Community
Crisis Management: Communications Best Practices – Department of Energy
If you need additional information or support creating crisis communications plans explicitly designed to fit your organization or business, contact us to learn more! We would love to help!
About the Author: Stephen Alfano is an Organizational Change Management Consultant and Communications Expert. He has over 30 years of experience in leading and managing initiatives for both private and public-sector clients. His résumé includes providing both new business and business process improvement services to Apple, American Express, AT&T, California Department of Transportation, Chevron, Entergy, Levi Strauss & Co., Louisiana Office of Tourism, Mattel, Microsoft, Novell, SONY, Sutter Health, and Wells Fargo. Stephen currently works as an Executive Consultant with KAI Partners, Inc., providing change management and communications expertise and project management support services on several active contracts.
January 23, 2020
Best Practices, Communications, Digital Transformation, Government, Innovation, Innovation in the Public Sector, Managing/Leadership, Project Management, Project Management Professional (PMP), Public Sector, Sacramento, Strategic Plan
By Nick Sherrell, PMP, MBA, CSM
January is the time of new. We have shaken off the retrospective December and are opening our eyes to new ideas and new possibilities for our careers, our personal lives, our habits, and perhaps even some new hobbies.
This January has a couple extra layers of ‘new.’ Not only is it a new year, but a new decade. On top of that, the term “2020” is a cliché connotation for someone having perfect vision.
Many clients I work with have a Strategic Plan. It is typically that document found somewhere deep inside their document library that pops up when you are using the search feature to find some other document. It is usually from a year or two ago, and sometimes still contains a ‘Draft’ watermark.
What happened?
All too often, it follows the same path that many of our personal new year’s resolutions take. A great exercise to think about our future with a lot of creative brainstorming, dreaming, and sometimes (let’s be honest here) wishful thinking. We write it all down, even set some abstract goals, and then…life hits! Critical staff get sick (or have kids that get sick). A new decision comes from the larger organization that shakes up your organizational structure. Sometimes those old habits are just too tempting to pass up, just like that dessert case at The Cheesecake Factory!
Does this sound like a familiar scenario at your organization? If you need help putting your Strategic Plan into place—or creating one in the first place!—we would love to help! Contact us today to learn more!
About the Author: Nick Sherrell is a Project Manager with over 10 years of healthcare experience ranging from Quality, Performance Improvement, Technology Implementation, Data Analysis, and Consulting. Nick has worked with organizations ranging from the Sacramento Native American Health Center, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Blue Shield of California, and The Advisory Board Company. He currently works for KAI Partners, Inc as a Project Manager Consultant on Public contracts with the State of California, most notably with the Judicial Council of California and California Medicaid Management Information Systems. He received his MBA from UC Davis in 2015 with an emphasis in Organizational Behavior and Innovation. He became a Certified Scrum Master in 2018 through Scrum Alliance training offered at KAIP Academy. He lives in Sacramento with his wife, two children, and Golden Retriever Emma. Find Nick on LinkedIn here.