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/