|
Houston County looking at strategic planning sessions
|
|
|
By Charlie Warner
Argus News Editor
Should Houston County spend approximately $4,200 to hold a series of strategic planning sessions for department heads and county commissioners? That’s something county board members chewed over this past week.
Several weeks ago Commissioner Larry Connery suggested the county take a look at bringing in Diane Amundson, of Express Business Solutions in Winona, to coordinate planning sessions. Connery had recently participated in a series of sessions Amundson had put on for ABLE, was impressed with Amundson’s work, and felt it could be beneficial to Houston County.
Amundson made a presentation at the May 6 county board meeting, where she explained what the planning sessions would entail.
The strategic planning process for Houston County would include four three-hour sessions, spread out over several months. Department heads and county commissioners would be strongly encouraged to attend each session. The process is designed to create team building, as well as assessing what is right and not right with the current system, and ways to make improvements.
Session one would include reviewing expectations, team building exercises, reviewing the current mission statement, core value/culture statement development, and a fact finding assignment.
Session two would include a review of core values and culture statement a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and trends) analysis, and future trend activity.
During the third session the group would review a draft of a mission statement, discuss core values, develop strategic initiatives and long term goals and short term objectives.
The fourth session will include the final review of core values and the mission and culture statement, strategic initiatives, long term goals and short term objectives, clarify roles for the plan of action and determine success factors.
The cost of the program would be $4,000 for 12 hours of facilitation and 20 hours of preparation, plus mileage from Winona at 47 cents per mile.
“I feel this could be very beneficial to Houston County, especially right now, when we are looking at various ways of consolidating several departments and possibly creating a new one,” Commissioner Tom Bjerke said.
“This is something that could be beneficial to our long-range planning,” Connery added.
It appeared as if all the commissioners supported the idea, and will revisit the proposal at the May 13 meeting.
You can contact Charlie Warner at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
