Visualize your strategy's progress:

The strategic plan deployment tracker is a spreadsheet tool to help an organization track how the operational departments are supporting the strategic plan priorities through their individual operational plans as shown in Table 1.

This tool helps the organization understand what strategic priorities are being addressed fully, partially, or not at all in the various operating plans. This understanding can guide the organization to look at those not being supported, understand why and make a correction in the strategic plan if and where necessary.

It is best to use this tool after the strategic plan is developed and deployed to the operating departments as they develop their operational plans to align with the strategic plan. The organization needs to know if all the strategic priorities in the strategic plan have support or if some not being supported by the departments and why.
How to use it:

1. Draw the strategic plan deployment tracker as shown in Table 1 on a flip chart. Expand the number of rows to incorporate all of the strategic priorities you need to investigate. 

Table 1

2. List the strategic priorities and goals on the vertical axis and the operating departments on the top horizontal axis. 

3. Review each operating plan and put an “x” next to each of the Strategic Priority goals that each operating plan supports as shown in Table 2. We've populated the columns with departments from our example, Tri County Health Department.

Table 2

4. Once all the operating plans have been entered into the table check vertically to see if any strategic priority goals do not have an “x” entered as this will indicate no operating department is supporting that goal.

5. For goals not supported the strategic planning group should find out why. Sometimes the goal is too broad and not actionable and other times the operating departments feel they have no control over it. A cross functional team is needed to address the issue(s) since it spans many departments.

6. After a thorough investigation, the goals that were not supported should be clarified as to the action to be taken X. The actions to be taken could be:
• Eliminate the goal
• Reword and clarify the goal
• Have a cross-functional team take on the goal

Example: Tri County Health Department

Table 3

The Tri-County Health Department investigated three areas and found that the goals were too broad for any one department to handle such as develop a performance management system and needed to have a cross-functional team to tackle it.