Strategic Planning
Management Brief on CNCS
Xu Han
October 5, 2014
Summary of the Strategic Plan
The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) is a federal agency
which empowers and supports Americans to address challenges such as school success,
safe affordable housing, and disaster response, through a network of state service
commissions, intermediary organizations, grantees and sponsors. The 2011-2015 strategic
plan uses a typical neo-classical Bryson model incorporating Peter Drucker and
Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) strategic models and emphasizing public
input.
Currently, the CNCS are facing many challenges, however there are three main
issues that should be confronted by the organization, which are retention and the
availability of volunteers, difficulty of assessment of the programs, and human and financial
resources. The challenges might be coming out of the lack of short-run and long-run vision.
Is CNCS’s strategy predicting what will happy within first year, or what changes will be in
3-5 years, or even longer? This is a critical question to CNCS strategic planning. Therefore,
the implementation of The Serve America Act of 2009 became the driving force behind
these challenges. The Mandate of Serve America includes accountability, performance
measures, expanding opportunities, the capacities of individuals, and addressing
community challenges.
Factors such as change in the political climate, the occurrence of natural disasters,
and the increase of economic instability have made it difficult for CNCS to keep pace with
the external environment, in a way that external environmental demand is much greater
than the internal supply. Internally, the pace of change has remained slow as compared to
the external environment. In terms of political environment, CNCS should at least be
prepared for changes in each two or four years, according to political agenda, by enlarging
the flexibility of responses to these changes. The CNCS strategic plan is not envisioning the
possibilities of the near and far future.
Even if the goals of 2011-2015 strategic plan are met, the combination of minimal
internal flexibility with rapid external change outside is so drastic that it needs a constant
revisiting of the objectives. It is time for CNSC to critically think about what internal
changes they can work on by brainstorming to keep themselves updated to the external
environment.
Strategic Plan
Based upon the analysis of CNSC current strategic plan, PESTE is probably the
appropriate strategic model to help with the constrains that CNSC is facing right now.
PESTE is a model that combines multiple driving forces, political, economic, social,
technological, and environmental. It can be also known as PESTLE, or PEST. It is directly
aimed at the external macro environmental factors that might be affecting the position of
the business. (Nishadha, 2012) These five forces probably covered the most critical
externalities to an organizational strategic plan.
It seems that CNCS has been facing with mostly political and economical constrains,
at the same time, considering social, technological and environmental factors will further
challenge the organization’s operation. By using PESTE strategic model, CNSC will partially
eliminate some of the difficulties they are facing at this point. PESTE lays out the external
environmental factors that are quite relevant to CNCS in terms of planning and
programming, since CNCS has a wide range of social programs, including disaster
responses. CNCS’ current strategic model doesn’t seem like it is adequately providing
strategic guidance for the organization’s near future and far future. However, PESTE is able
to help to predict what the future changes are, then CNCS will be able to prepare
themselves for these changes as a backup plan. Table 1 illustrates the how PESTE strategic
planning fits into CNCS current status.
CNCS’ challenges are driven by, The Serve of America Act of 2009, which is a more of
a political constrain they are facing with, and CNCS finds itself hard to keep up with the
new mandate, therefore, forecasting the political environment is quite important to a
federal agency. On the other hand, the economic instability also has an impact on CNCS
operation. At this point, CNCS should prioritize these two elements, as to take the first step
to resolution. In order to do that, PESTE can be used as an external environment scan tool
to examine the external factors, which would probably have an impact on the organization.
Only if CNCS figures out what the externalities will be, they will be able to responds to
critical changes. After the scanning, they will know better what is possibly going to change,
and how fast the change will be. At the end, a couple of corresponding plans will be
developed.
My projection of the new model will provide a bigger picture for CNCS to focus on
capacity and internal flexibility of the organization. Build upon the current goals and
objectives of CNCS, there is another goal can be added, which is to minimize the impact of
externalities. Under this goal, the objectives are meant to forecast the possibility of any
environmental change. The objectives are listed in table 2.
This goal will incorporate PESTE into CNCS strategic planning to identify external
environmental factors. Political factor is critical to CNCS since they are a federal agency,
which is affected the most by public policies. Under this circumstance, CNCS will have to
increase their awareness of political trend, especially more of the relevant. A few
approaches responding to political trend can be designed, and implemented when
necessary. For example, they may be able to shift budget from one program to the other if
policy has changed. Economic factor is as critical as political trend due to the importance of
itself. Without economic support, or financial resources, a strategic plan can be a well-done
paper work on shelf. Even though the budget is carefully made, the dramatic market can
reallocate financial resources to somewhere else, which is not in your favor. CNSC can
develop a backup plan responding to such financial constrains. For example, they can
allocate a larger reserved fund in order to cope with unexpected economic changes. Social
and environmental factors will impact CNCS as well, since CNCS has social programs such
as disaster response, veteran services. Environmental changes and social need changes
may exert big influence on CNCS’ general operation. Lastly, technological changes may
bring CNCS more opportunities in terms of program and volunteer management.
Under PESTE strategic plan, CNCS should continue on the programs they are good
at, meanwhile, they should allocate some organizational development funding as to
strengthen their own capacity. They can either outsource this component to an
institutional entity to help them assess their current capacity and need, or they can initiate
brainstorm internally, since they have more insight and knowledge of their organization.
There is no perfect prevention from being confronted by challenges, yet there are ways to
mitigate the impact of the challenges.
With PESTE strategic planning adopted, the future questions might be if PESTE has
incorporated all the critical external factors. Even if it has incorporated all the factors, the
scenarios the organization has developed to correspondent to them can’t guarantee a full
coverage of problems.
Conclusion
The adoption of PESTE strategic model in CNCS is likely to help the organization
think ahead. Through PESTE scanning process, it basically examines the possible external
factors which are more possibly to influence the organization. And this process set up an
alert to the organization to be prepared. Overall, CNCS has clear goals and objectives, they
probably can perform better if they have future challenges in mind before it happens.
PESTE might be a good enlightenment for the organization in terms of thinking critically,
and it is the first step to resolution in terms of CNCS’s current problems.
Appendices
Table 1.
Current State
Trend
Solutions
1. Retention and the
External changes is
PESTE helps to identify the
availability of volunteers
greater than internal
critical external factors:
flexibility responding
2. Difficulty of assessment of
the changes
Political: The Serve America Act
the programs
of 2009
3. Human and financial
Economic: Economic instability
resources.
Social: Change of social needs
Technology: Possible external
resource for program and
volunteer management
Environmental: Natural disaster
responses
Table 2.
Goal
To minimize the impact of externalities by maximizing the value of
external environment scan.
Objectives
1. Increase awareness of public policies that may impose heavy influence
on organization’s operation.
2. Increase awareness of external factors, which may impose heavy
influence on organization’s operation.
3. Increase the internal flexibility to cope with possible changes.
4. Increase capacity of innovative thinking among staff.
References
Nishadha, 2012, SWOT Analysis Vs PEST Analysis and When to Use Them, The
Creately Blog, Retrieved on Oct 5, 2014 from: http://creately.com/blog/diagrams/swotanalysis-vs-pest-analysis/