Session 2 by Milky

Session 2. What strategies does your organisation have in place to encourage development, change and innovation? Identify a model of change to help explain.

Actually，I do not have any working experiences so I just can say something about  understanding of the organisation strategies.

In order to understand if the change programmes have been considered within the context of an overall strategy it was important to ask the interviewees some details about their strategy process. For example, this referred to the development of the community strategy for local authorities or, the vision and objectives for the government agencies.

Strategic Planning and Development

For many of the cases, in common with many large organisations, "strategy was a struggle". Strategy was cited as taking a back seat to operational requirements"can't spend too much time on strategy - too busy running things" and, that it was difficult sometimes to get the whole organisation to implement something consistently.

There was a question mark about how effective strategic planning was, citing political tensions with different pulls on politicians and managers making it difficult to create a coherent strategy for the organisation. However, for one health case, they have used this tension to their advantage by influencing the development of the plan as they had leaders in this field and areas of high profile best practice. For another case study, however, the decision to expand the provision was felt to be not well thought through and not part of a formally-planned strategy.

There is a clear link between Lean and organisational strategy; and realisation and understanding of the relationship between the two can help drive organisation performance

Linking Strategy and Improvement

In most cases the connection，between the organisation's aim, strategy, business/departmental/community plans and the continuous improvement work was fairly weak although there was acknowledgment that a clearer understanding of the relationship would be helpful. The ability to generate and sustain improvement activities with the strategic objectives and goals of the organisation can help in prioritising improvement and make it an integral part of their activity and not something separate .

In another case there was partial alignment of the strategic goals to the improvement activity but these goals were not known to the entire organisation. Hence, the link between the strategic goals and the improvement exercise could not be drawn and so it led to a certain amount of scepticism, lack of ownership and a feeling of another top down initiative.

For one local authority there was a formal strategic planning process linked to the electoral cycle and, in the opinion of one of the Senior Managers, the Council has recently got better at linking the strategic plan and service plans. However, the links between the strategy and budget planning were weak and it was also perceived that there was a weak connection between strategy and improvement.

This was supported by a health case where the improvement programme had not yet been sufficiently integrated into the organisation's strategy, which had constrained its effectiveness. The following exchange with the regional facilitator indicates that, in this case, there was no systematic link between strategy and service improvement.