NEW LEXINGTON — Perry County Job and Family Services (PCJFS) has recently begun work on developing an ambitious new strategic plan, meant to guide the agency through this year and next as it attempts to build on its strengths and address some areas where it believes it could make improvement.
Agency Public Information Officer Brooke Cannon emphasized that the plan is still a work in progress, which JFS will continue to develop and refine.
“This was the first of our strategic plans in a long time… it is something that we are currently working on,” Cannon said. “We did just recently get it on the website and got it out to the community. We wanted to do that in the process of moving into the Opportunity Center. We’re still working on all of the things, and it’s going to be something we continue to build on.”
To create the plan PCJFS first collected input from its customers, staff, partners and stakeholders during a two-day planning event. Using this information, the agency identified the strategic advantages it currently enjoys, the strategic challenges it needs to overcome, and the strategic opportunities available for making improvements.
The strong points identified are many, and include a robust community presence achieved through proactive outreach efforts; a brand-new state of the art facility in the Perry County Opportunity Center, expertise in grant management, an award-winning transit program, and a willingness to take risks to meet community needs.
The plan doesn’t flinch, however, from also identifying the challenges that PCJFS faces, some of them internal to the organization. These include the need for a more systematic process to get feedback from its own workforce to identify opportunities for improvement; shortcomings in internal communication that lead to inefficiencies; a shortage of “internal adaptability” to help PCJFS adjust to an ever-changing political and funding landscape; and the lack of a methodical approach to ranking different projects by priority.
With challenges come opportunities, however, and the plan identifies a number of them, of varying degrees of specificity. Some aim to address the agency’s internal issues; for example, the plan calls for improvement in areas such as employee onboarding, professional development and “organizational culture,” to increase staffers’ engagement and satisfaction with their jobs. Others have more to do with the population PCJFS serves; such as the desire to create more opportunities for the agency’s workforce to deal with customers one-on-one, and the development of new programs to reach underserved populations.
Starting from these kinds of general principles, PCJFS intends as its next step to develop “long- and short-term action plans,” specific targets, and metrics to assess the agency’s progress.
The heart of the plan is a strategy map, which works all of the above into a kind of hierarchy of categories, moving from the broader to the more specific: Goals, objectives, initiatives, measures and targets.
One goal, for instance, is the fairly broad one of improving the agency’s performance. More specific objectives related to that goal are improving accountability and effectiveness. Narrowing the focus still further, initiatives stemming from this goal will address such things as project prioritization, and a communication plan for the agency. Measures of success will be the actual creation of the communication plan, and development of key performance indicators for a data center. The ultimate targets aimed at will be to implement the communication plan and data center program.
PCJFS is working with the Mid-East Ohio Regional Council to build out some of the ideas in the new plan, and will be meeting with a MEORC representative over the next couple of months to develop more specific action plans.
Calling the development of the new plan “a really big learning experience,” Cannon suggested that it’s a living document, that will continue to evolve. And as the agency moves ahead with turning the concepts in the plan into realities, she said, it will at the same time be sharpening its focus on better ways to do that.
“Strategic plans are made to kind of build and grow on, and you get a really good standpoint when you’re on like your second or third phase,” she noted. “When we go to the next phase of our strategic plan I think is where we’re really going to be able to see and understand more of the action items and opportunities, things like that.”
Email at jphillips@perrytribune.com
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