ABSTRACT
The public services in theUnited States and theUnitedKingdom experimented in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the idea of a planning-programmingbudgeting system (PPBS), which can be seen as an ancestor of the strategic planning systems that were subsequently developed in the late 1980s and 1990s. There were also attempts by the United Nations during the 1970s to encourage the use of planning based on objective setting to produce improvements in performance. Again this can be seen as a precursor to contemporary strategic management practices in the public services. In the early 1980s, the diffusion of strategic planning into government and
public services was still limited. Douglas Eadie (1983: 447) wrote that ‘there is ample evidence that strategic planning of some kind is widely practised by large business : : : Strategic planning has barely penetrated the collective consciousness of the public sector’. Over the next 20 years, the use of strategic planning spread, and more and more public services organizations wrote strategic plans. Berry and Wechsler (1995: 159) remarked, ‘since the early 1980s, strategic planning has been one of the ‘‘hot’’ innovations in public administration, promising public agencies the benefits of a rational and highly structured, future-oriented management technique borrowed from the best run private sector companies’. A strategic plan can be defined as a formal statement of strategy, that is, a written
document setting out a strategy. A strategy for a public service organization (or a consortiumof organizations)maybedefined as comprising strategic goals and
a plan of action to achieve those goals (Heymann 1987). Formulating a strategy tends to involvemaking decisions that affect who benefits from the organization’s activities, and what these benefits are. A strategy tends to have effects that are wide-ranging in their impact across the organization. Also, in consequence, a strategy tends to involve decisions with significant resource (money, people etc.) implications. Strategic plans come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can be quite lengthy,
comprising many pages. They can go into great detail on services and programmes. They can vary in the degree to which they are produced as working documents for the management team, or as public relations (PR) documents for external stakeholders. In fact, individual organizations may find it useful to produce several versions of the strategic plan for different stakeholders. For example, one version of a strategic plan may be in use as a working document by the management, another version may be distributed to the public, a third version may be distributed to employees, and a fourth version might contain suitable performance and financial data so that it can be used in reporting to oversight bodies. The different versions might have different functions – from reassuring the public to mobilizing support of politicians and employees, from an inspiring but real plan for future activity to a compulsory report to oversight bodies. In this chapter we will look at types of strategic planning process in the public
services and its benefits. We will also consider how strategic planning can be more responsive to the wishes and needs of the public. We finish the chapter with a brief discussion of the difference between strategic planning and management that, to some extent, acts as an introduction to the following chapter, which has a focus on implementation.
