Section 1110 Strategic Planning (Part 2)

 

Rewind…

Before I describe the remainder of this strategic planning session, I’d like to back up a bit. Because after all, who are we doing all of this for? Yes, our stakeholders. I neglected to mention this in my first post about our strategic planning session. Rest assured, before we started to work on our X-Martix, Jd had us perform a stakeholder analysis. The team cam up with the list below. Fine work, I’d say.

All the work we do as an NPO is meant to please one or more of these groups. The needs of these groups are changing continually and for us quality professionals to remain effective and relevant, we must change to meet the needs of our “customers”, the stakeholders listed below.

ASQ Section 2110 VOC Stakeholder Analysis

07/2011

Parent: ASQ	Members/Community	Member Leaders	Community (Organizations)
Impact	Networking	Tools to help be a leader	Professional resources
Membership	Certification/Professional Development (paid)	Support form other members	Improvement contributions made by members
Loyalty	Professional Development (unpaid)	Recognition/Certifications, Thank-You’s	Support for QA professionals
Means/Revenue	Free Learnings/Resources	Leadership development opportunity	Leadership council to listen
Process Performance	Dinner Education/Learning events	Company support	Collaboration on business/community issues
People	Search and find of relative content
	Best practices
	Job opportunities

If you’d like an electronic copy of Jd’s handout from the session, it’s available here in the Member Leader section of the ASQ website. Remember, you must be logged in to asq.com for the link above to work.  Throughout the remainder of the day, we alternated between working in small teams and working as one large group.

Initiatives

With our goals set, we needed to establish initiatives that help us to achieve our goals. The team came up with  this list of 17 initiatives.

• Develop Section Operations Manual and technology source for sharing
• Develop a Balanced Score Card for the Section
• Develop F2F strategy
• Develop print strategy
• Develop virtual strategy (data management and section sharing of information)
• Develop a touchpoint strategy
• Develop promotion activities for members less than 5 years
• Establish Recognition activities for members (>5 years)
• Define and analyze loyalty performance data
• Establish more opportunities to share and discuss professional services
• Establish more networking opportunities based on benchmarking and job searches
• Establish relevant learning and professional development opportunities
• Develop baseline VOC performance level
• Increase community involvement
• New Member Recruitment
• Execute Monthly Newsletter
• Execute Program Plan

 

Tactics

Having defined the initiatives necessary to accomplish our goals, we next chose the specific tactics necessary to  carry out out initiatives.

• Create a chair position for section management
• Create section manual
• Develop/Utilize succession planning, strategic management of section, and key measures
• Identify and implement use of technology to share section data and history (SharePoint, drop box, cloud, etc.)
• Plan, develop and implement user-friendly website w/section information. Include mechanisms for networking, sharing
• Lessons Learned
• Develop plan and utilize social networking media (LI, Facebook, Twitter, etc)
• Develop touchpoint plan based on timing and delivery method (F2F, print, virtual)
• Generate profile bios of members in newsletter
• Create recognition plan across pre-defined events (anniversary, new job, cert status, promotions, etc)
• Categorize membership loyalty data into 2 groups (<5 yr, >5 yr)
• Identify and communicate the SMEs on quality tools (IVP) and link to website
• Identify and leverage existing quality tool templates and examples to share with community (website)
• Define programming for network, benchmark, and job opportunities
• Develop opportunities for mentorship
• Define and provide experiential development opportunities through community outreach
• Use VOC to identify required training and certification training needs
• Hold an executive roundtable to get their expectations on VOC requirements
• Analyze internal data for VOC to determine baseline. Include demographic splits of new member needs. (< 5 yrs)
• Invite community leadership to dinner meetings
• Join chamber of commerce. Leverage and implement free advertisements on their site
• Plan, implement YQP Events
• Plan, Implement college activities (pizza events)
• Plan, draft and execute printing of monthly newsletter. Recognize member events
• Source and secure speakers/tours for program events and manage logistics

Metrics

As all of us must already understand, the only way to gauge our success is to measure our performance. The team came up with the metrics below for us to gauge our ability to serve our stakeholders.

• Touchpoints
• Retention Rate
• Membership Rate
• Attendance at Section meetings
• Social Media Membership (virtual)
• Loyalty
• Cost of Membership Retention
• Checking and Savings Balance, Liquidity
• Succession Planning Depth
• % Objectives Achieved
• Job Hunt successes

Wrap Up

Shortly after our strategic planning session, Jd sent a copy of her excel worksheet to me. It’s a great document that recorded all of our activities and decisions from our session. As an added bonus, there’s a tab that is a ready to go QMP template.

Ever helpful, Jd offered her guidance for 1110

Next steps:
> check for any other tactics consolidation
> Assign tactics to member leader owners
> Enter in member leader names
> complete  “key metrics ” data page
> finalize  graphs for show ‘n tell
> track status of execution at least quarterly

Also, there were these good ideas that came to light during the session, but we didn’t fit them into our plans. We called this the parking lot.

PARKING LOT ITEMS:  Check to see if you want to incorporate these additional parking lot items (or if they are already in here)

> Dinner idea
> Historical interviews
> Conference piggy-backing
> Local college partnerships
> Section manual (leverage QMD?)
> NCAFE
> Quality manager starter course
> Section communication to member leadership bosses (Thank-yous, plaques, etc.)

 

 

Action Plan for 1110

In terms of strategic planning and preparing for our 2011 – 2012 calendar year, what remains for the leadership team is:

(1) Review the strategic plan, ensure leadership team buy-in and assign ownership to the individual tasks

(2) Submit our QMP to Milwaukee (by Sept 30)

(3) Agree on our program activities for the year, are they consistent with the strategic plan?

(4) Work up the budget to match the plan, submit our budget to Milwaukee (by Sept 30)

Section 1110 Strategic Planning (Part 1)

On Saturday, July 23, 2011, the Charlotte Section of the ASQ held a strategic planning session to prepare for our program activities for the 2011 – 2012 session. Jd Marhevko, Chair off the Quality Management Division, graciously volunteered to facilitate this session for us. We held this event at Wikoff Color, who have graciously offered their facility yet again to host an ASQ event.

During our preparing for this event, Jd’s  sent these encouraging comments to Ed Back: 

“Your section is one of just a handful that follows the Supplier Management Plan (SMP) process for managing your objectives.”

Since 1110 already uses the SMP (aka QMP) to to plan and measure section performance, we were quite prepared to graduate to this next level of leadership planning. Our 2010-2011 QMP lists six section objectives which Jd entered into her template for Saturday’s Strategic Planning session.

The day started with introductions. Jd  motivated and encouraged us by pointing out that Saturday’s participants, had 282 years worth of industry experience and this expertise should help us to develop a great strategic plan. Next Jd presented an overview of the Quality Management Division. While it was interesting to learn about this large, talented and successful division of the ASQ, the real learning opportunity was Jd’s thorough description of  QMD’s Strategic Plan.

I was quickly apparent that Jd is a great speaker and leader, as well as a skilled strategic planner. We had 10 folks from the leadership team present as well as one former leader.We worked at a fast, yet enjoyable, pace. I enjoyed watching the newer member leaders interact with the seasoned veterans. It was soon clear that the entire room was focused on creating great experiences for the members in Section 1110.

So what is a strategic plan, anyways?
These guys offer a simple description of a strategic plan.

“…strategic planning determines where an organization is going over the next year or more, how it’s going to get there and how it’ll know if it got there or not.”

While 1110 does a great job of planning and execution every year, I was glad to take this opportunity to step back and develop our plan in a more formal and collaborative environment where we could develop our programs in relation to the member’s perceived value of the services we provide. It was an exciting day. Jd set our agenda as follows:

• Introductions
• Section history
• SWOT Analysis
• Stakeholder Analysis: 
  • VOC Overview (if any has been done)
  • ASQ parent strategies
  • Volunteers (member leaders)
  • Local community
  • Other
• Review/Development of Strategies (SMART format)
• Identification of initial performance metrics (via strategies –output metrics)
• Development of Initiatives from strategies
• Development of Tasks from initiatives
• Identification of input performance metrics (via tactics – input metrics)
• Review of TQ/McDermond Award criteria

Pat Trudeau present Jd with a brief history of Section 1110. Other leaders piped in to help describe the stories from 1110’s past. We quickly moved on to the “meat” of the day’s activities.

SWOT Analysis

As you may already know, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats. For this activity we broke into teams and brainstormed on each individual category. We did this in such a way that everyone had an opportunity to both offer ideas for each category as well as evaluate he ideas of the other teams. Once the team reviewed the SWOT, we ranked the ideas.

Strength		Weakness
Opportunity		Threat

The  X Matrix

Many of you may know this as Hoshin Kanri, the Japanese Quality Policy Deployment methodology used to link objectives to goals.

We used the six Objectives from our 2010 SMP to start the X-Matrix process. Jd suggested that we add one more objective: Formalize the section management process. The team accepted her suggestion and we went to work rewording these objectives as SMART goals. As we reworded the goals Jd suggested that we incorporate the ASQ strategy themes that we find important into our objectives .

ASQ STRATEGY THEMES (06 2011)

1. Increase Impact. Support Global Transformation
1. Increase Impact. Support Social Responsibility
2. Grow Membership. Number of Organizations Served
2. Grow Membership. Grow Number of Members Engaged in Member Unit Activities
2. Grow Membership. Grow Renewing Members
3. Customer Loyalty. Grow Member Retention
3. Customer Loyalty. Enhance the Value of the QBoK Through Strategic Use
4. Means. Grow Professional Certifications
4. Means. Increase Use of ASQ Training
5. Process Performance. Use Technology to Enable Information Sharing
5. Process Performance. Improve Performance using Baldrige Criteria or other    Methodology
6. People: Increase Member Leader Satisfaction
6. People: Increase Member Satisfaction
6. People: Increase Member Leaders Participating in Leadership Training

Section 1110’s Objectives:

1. Section will provide touchpoints to enable members to improve quality, productivity, safety and quality of worklife as a result of a section activity as reported to a report out venue (newletter, meeting, etc.) with at least documented improvement in a section year.

2.  Increase Member Retention to 4% through new member recruitment, relevant programs, and increased community involvement

3.  Increase Member Satisfaction by 10% within one year

4. Measure and understand level of customer loyalty and then improve baseline by 10%

5. Increase awareness of section within the membership and non-membership communities (i.e. local businesses, colleges, and NPOs) by delivering 50 touchpoints across those entities

6.  Develop and deploy at least two means of marketing to promote section within in the community each month over the next 12 months (Awareness)

7.  Formalize Section Management process by establishing a transparent BSC and a operations manual by year end

Touchpoints

You’ll see that we refer to touchpoints. This is a sales and marketing term.

touchpoint
Pronunciation:
/ˈtʌtʃpɔɪnt/

noun
a point of contact or interaction, especially between a business and its customers or consumers:
every touchpoint must reflect, reinforce, and reiterate your core brand strategy

We use the word to describe an interaction with a member and non-member communities.

And there’s more…

After this, the team developed Initiatives, Tactics, and Metrics. If anyone in interested, I’ll finish this blog post.

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This guy trashes Fredrick Taylor, MBAs, and the entire consulting profession.
The Management Myth. Interesting read.

Today, I met a lot of nice people at The Quality Conference of the Carolinas. If you attended my presentation; thanks!  If you’d like a copy, click here.

On the Air

I started this blog to complement my presentation at the 2011 Quality Conference of the Carolinas. While the blog is not complete, it has enough info to be useful. Your comments are greatly appreciated.