2.2 Overview of Planning

This section provides further information about how to plan well, based on your overall strategy.

Why do I need to plan? Can’t we just do our job?

Your organisational purpose may be clear (and relatively static), but your environment, and society, change over time. Your needs and the needs of those you regulate will change. And so your organisational focus will inevitably shift over time. You will stand a much higher chance of making a positive difference through your work if you regularly look ahead and outwards, and have a clear vision and a set of aims to focus your limited resources on. Having a strategy in place is therefore the first step towards knowing what it is that you need to plan. Once you have a good plan in place, you are much more likely to be able to achieve good outcomes while managing within the resources available to you.

Compare it to setting off on a voyage in a sailing ship. If you have no idea where you are heading, you are likely to find yourself shipwrecked, lost or becalmed. If on the other hand you have set off with a clear idea of where you want to go, it may still be that you get diverted sometimes by bad weather, but you will reach your destination in the end. If you have no destination, you could end up anywhere. And who is going to go with you to crew your ship if you can’t even tell them where you are going?

What do we mean when we talk about ‘having a plan’?

There are different levels of planning.

The vision and strategy set by the Board should guide all your other planning.

An annual corporate plan (sometimes called a business plan) will be needed to record, at organisational level, which aspects of the strategy will be delivered in each financial year, and with what resources.

Operational plans will set out in detail how each team within the organisation will deliver its particular parts of the corporate plan each year, and monitoring operational delivery will give you a good sense of how the overall delivery of your strategy is going.

Each member of staff will have their own individual objectives and should be able to see a clear link between their own work, their team’s work, the annual corporate plan, and the overall vision set by the Board.

It’s important that your layers of planning join up and are aligned with your strategic vision. Every piece of work delivered should represent another step towards making the vision a reality.

Here is a diagram to illustrate the levels of strategy and planning:

2.2.1 Corporate plan

2.2.1.1 Overview of a corporate plan

Your corporate plan will contain a more detailed breakdown of exactly what you will do to reach your strategic objectives, and how and when this will be achieved.

More operational than a strategy, it sets out the work you will do in a single business year to make progress towards your longer-term goals. You may even be able to set a longer-term corporate plan covering the entire period of your strategy - this will depend on your funding model and any oversight requirements by other bodies.

The corporate plan will need to demonstrate that you have considered how to resource your planned activity within your annual budget and your operational capacity.

If you publish your corporate plan, it is also likely to include a description of achievements and developments in the previous year, and some performance metrics, to illustrate the progress you have already made towards your strategic vision and goals.

Here is an overview diagram showing the typical contents of a corporate plan:

2.2.1.2 Detail of a corporate plan

2.2.1.2.1 Organisational Information

Organisational purpose

It’s a good idea to restate your organisational purpose near the beginning of your corporate plan, since your readership may include people who are not particularly familiar with your role as the oversight body for political finance. This information will help to frame the rest of the information for them.

Legislation and functions

In most countries, the role of the political finance oversight institution is set out in legislation. It’s a good idea to make this clear in your corporate plan. This will enable others to gain more of an understanding of the nature and basis of your work, and to appreciate that some aspects of your organisational purpose are statutory rather than self-determined.

If you operate in an environment where legislative changes in the political finance area are common, or upcoming, this also provides you with a chance to explain how this may affect your work in the coming year.

2.2.1.2.2 Objectives

Current strategic objectives

Your corporate plan will go on to set out in some detail the activities you plan to do across the year. Since those activities will contribute to the delivery of the strategy, it’s a good idea to summarise your strategic vision and long term objectives (from your strategy) at the beginning of your corporate plan. This will also enable you to take the reader (and your staff) on a journey, from your organisational purpose, to a reminder of your strategic intent, and then on to an account of how you plan to move towards your vision in the coming year.

It’s not necessary to address every strategic aim in every business year, unless it makes sense to do so. You may choose to focus on one or two strategic objectives each year until the whole strategy has been delivered.

Main short-term objectives (for the financial year)

Your current objectives should follow directly from your longer-term strategic objectives, breaking them down into more manageable chunks. It is useful to show how achieving your current objectives will contribute to the achievement of your strategic objectives, and how this will be measured. You may for instance have two or three shorter term annual corporate plan objectives for each of the strategic objectives you are planning to make progress on during the year. Corporate plan objectives broadly tend to relate to workstreams or projects. They should also be SMART (see How to write SMART objectives.pdf).

At corporate plan level, you will also include the aspects of your core work that support delivery of the strategy indirectly – such as ensuring that staff are retained or recruited, working collaboratively with other organisations, maintaining your website, responding to information requests and so on. There may also be important statutory duties that your organisation is responsible for every year, regardless of the current strategy. You may therefore have some ‘standing objectives’ in the corporate plan relating to your core activities, relating to ensuring the smooth running of your organisation, supporting its infrastructure, and maintaining your external relationships, communications and reputation. For example, you may be responsible for receiving, reviewing and publishing the annual accounts of political parties within a set timeframe. It’s important to include these types of objectives as well as work that is particular to your current strategy, since all of it needs to be delivered within your available resource envelope.

2.2.1.2.3 Performance

Achievements in the previous year

This is an opportunity to blow your own trumpet! But it’s also good practice to include information about the degree to which you delivered the activities set out in the corporate plan you published the previous year. It is also important to note any areas where you were unable to achieve everything you set out to do, and to explain the reasons for this and what you will do to address this in the current year.

If your corporate plan is the first in a new strategic period, this is also a chance to describe how you met your previous strategic vision and objectives. Writing about your achievements gives your stakeholders confidence that you can deliver on your new strategy too, and is a good chance to publicly thank people who contributed to previous work.

Measures of success and performance

It’s a good idea to include a general explanation of how you measure your success and the benefits of your work. This may be through formal monitoring during and after a project, through consultation and surveys, through self-assessment, through external or internal audit, through setting milestones and key performance metrics or by other means.

A concise explanation can be useful to show to potential funders, auditors and your Board. It demonstrates that you run a proactive learning-oriented organisation that pays attention to its real-world impacts and is responsive in adjusting its plans to secure better outcomes.

You will probably have a detailed performance management report that you take to the Board regularly. For the corporate plan, it is good practice to pick some of the performance indicators that you feel broadly reflect your overall performance as an organisation (e.g. staff turnover, speed of response to queries), and to report on these in each corporate plan.

You may also set particular measures of success for the objectives and activities set out in your corporate plan. There is no need to go overboard and try to measure everything – just include a few key measures or milestones that you can report back on in the following year’s plan. For example, if your corporate plan objectives target increased transparency and compliance with the law, you may want to select success measures such as:

• X % of required reports being submitted on time (and maybe set the percentage higher than what you achieved the year before)
• Publication of financial data (or reports submitted) within X days of receipt
• X % of requests for advice to be responded to within Y days of receipt
• X% of investigations completed within a specified time
• Less than X inaccuracies in the financial data published

You will also want to ensure there are some objectives for the efficient running of the organisation such as:

• Delivery of activities within agreed budgets and any forecast underspends swiftly redeployed to bring forward implementation of strategic objectives, if appropriate
• Recruitment for all vacancies completed within X weeks/months.

2.2.1.2.4 Activities

Activities planned for the year

Beneath each corporate plan objective, you should set out the activities that will be undertaken, the estimated timescale for the activities, and the intended outcomes and benefits. This is the right place for the more detailed breakdown you omitted from the strategy. Examples of activities for the year might include:

• Publish guidance on election campaign finance rules X months before the electoral period begins;
• Revise internal procedures on the receipt and review of statutory reports by X date;
• Organise and deliver training sessions for journalists and chief financial officers of political parties.

You should review your progress regularly throughout the year and report back to your Board on successes and on any major deviations from the intended plan which might require a decision or some reprioritisation in-year.

Your staff teams will each develop operational plans to help them deliver their parts of the corporate plan. This helps you to ensure that everything you have publicly said you will do, will in fact get done.

2.2.1.2.5 Financial Information

Financial picture

The corporate plan should include your budget for the year, including any relevant information about unusual or specific funding packages that may apply in one year only. In some countries, for example, the annual budget for the political finance oversight body is augmented for parliamentary elections. In addition, you may receive special funding for a particular capital project.

If possible, you should include a budget breakdown that illustrates how each objective has been costed. Some objectives will be delivered purely through staff resources, so a proportion of your staff costs will be the only factor. Other activities may involve contractors, legal fees, equipment hire, and other services.

It’s important that the Board are aware of the resource envelope you need to deliver the activities set out in the corporate plan. Sometimes this may mean having challenging discussions with your Board to arrive at a solution in your corporate plan that is deliverable, without compromising the vision. You may for instance need to extend your strategy from three to four or five years to be able to deliver the vision in full given available resources. It’s important to have those discussions internally in advance of publishing your strategy, so that when you come to write your annual corporate plan, you already have a realistic outline plan for delivery that you know is affordable.

2.2.1.2.6 Other information you may be required to include

If you are under the oversight of another body, they may require you to include other additional information in your corporate plan. Check with them to see if there is a set of rules you should be aware of. For example, they may request that you provide some information about how you are complying with Government policies on office occupancy, the green agenda, equalities legislation, and information access requirements; or they may ask you to explain your audit arrangements in your corporate plan.

Make sure you discover what your obligations are and address these as required in your corporate plan. Also ensure you are aware of any required review and sign-off process for your corporate plan and budget, before you go ahead and publish.

2.2.1.3 Developing a corporate plan

You should have (or establish) a regular annual planning cycle, and base your corporate plan on your strategy and your ongoing core work. Structuring your plan to match your strategy will help you to keep track, over time, of which aspects of the current strategy have already been delivered, and which still need some work. Producing your corporate plan should be a coordinated activity, involving all the teams whose work will be set out in the plan – it’s important that people have appropriate input, as this will make the resulting plan more robust and more realistic. For hints and tips on how to develop a corporate plan, see Developing a corporate plan – hints and tips.pdf.

For example of a corporate plan template, see Template corporate plan.pdf.

For examples, see the Corporate Plan of the UK Electoral Commission, and of Elections Canada. 

2.2.2 Operational plans

2.2.2.1 Overview of an operational plan

An operational (or business) plan will set out in detail how and when a team will undertake all of their activities in the year. Your organisation should have a set of joined up operational plans that collectively deliver everything you have publicly committed to in your corporate plan.

The type of work set out in operational (team level) plans will vary tremendously depending on the function of the team. Therefore, the content and lay-out will also vary – for example an IT development team’s operational plan will look very different from a Policy team’s plan, and may even be created in different software. It isn’t a problem if different teams’ operational plans look completely different – the purpose of the operational plan is for the team to be able to manage and monitor their own work effectively.

Operational plans should be discussed early among teams, alongside the development of each year’s corporate plan. There should be oversight of this level of planning by senior management to ensure that the operational plans are in line with the corporate plan and the strategy.

Here is a diagram showing the areas an operational plan should cover:

2.2.2.2 Detail of an operational plan

2.2.2.2.1 Activities, timescales and interdependencies:

Operational plans should include all the team’s planned activities for the year, set out month by month, and the intended timescales. It’s also important that team leaders, in particular, pay attention to assumptions, dependencies and interdependencies within the organisation, when planning out the work, so as not to double-commit resources – this is especially important where different teams need to work together on certain projects.

For example, you may wish to issue guidance for political parties regarding an upcoming election. If you also want to use that guidance in training sessions, you will need to determine the timing for the training sessions, the time needed to draft, review, consult on and finalise the guidance material. If you need to have the legal department review the guidance along the way, time will need to be set aside for the legal review and you will need to ensure that it doesn’t coincide with a time when legal colleagues are busy working on other things, like challenges to other regulatory decisions. If your communication/PR colleagues will be involved in the finalisation and dissemination of the guidance material, their work other commitment and schedules will have to be taken into account when developing your activity plan.

Teams should review their activities and progress regularly, for example at regularly scheduled team meetings. You should ensure your organisation has a clear ‘escalation route’ so that teams are able to report any delays or problems with delivery upwards, since this could necessitate prioritisation and resourcing discussions or senior management decisions about the way forward.

2.2.2.2.2 Ownership of activities

For each activity, there should be a specified lead who is accountable for the delivery of that work. Since an operational plan is a tool for managing the whole of the team’s work, it should also make clear who else is essential to each task. This will help to avoid scheduling conflicts and delays.

2.2.2.2.3 Budget and resources committed

For some pieces of work the budget committed may only be a proportion of staff salaries – in other words no additional budget costs will be anticipated since the activity only requires staff time. In other cases, there will be other costs as well, and your Finance team will need these costs to be profiled across the year (in other words, you will need to estimate when you will be spending the money).

It’s important that the team’s budget is aligned to the work it has been asked to do for the year. Annual budget discussions should occur alongside the development of the corporate plan, for this reason. With some projects, it may be necessary to do a degree of planning long before the project is due to begin, so as to bottom out the likely costs and ensure these are properly budgeted for at the start of the business year.

2.2.2.2.4 Reporting arrangements

It’s important that everyone is clear about lines of reporting, so that progress, successes and obstacles are understood by managers, and so that decisions are made at the right level in the organisation.

Perhaps you have a regular management team meeting that makes corporate decisions, or a programme board that oversees your project portfolio. It’s important that all team leaders, especially, are aware of the terms of reference of such internal groups, the thresholds at which certain decisions should be referred upwards, and of their own obligations to report on the team’s activities – especially if a piece of work is not going well.

The best laid plans can start to go awry because of real world events that couldn’t have been predicted at the planning stage. This is need not spell disaster. What is important is that staff report what is going on promptly, which in turn enables the wider organisation (and sometimes the Board) to make decisions about the work. Plans can be changed legitimately – the important thing is that any reprioritisation decisions are made with the vision and the strategy as a guide.

2.2.2.3 Developing operational plans

Operational plans should be developed by each team, and team leaders should involve their staff in planning. As noted earlier, different teams may use different formats to map out their plans, depending on the nature of their work. The main thing is to ensure that all the work they are committed to doing (in the corporate plan) is included, and that everything that is included is listed in the corporate plan. In other words, the operational plan should set out in more detail how and when the team will deliver their elements of your corporate activities; and teams should not be delivering unapproved work that is potentially at odds with your strategy and corporate plan.

For hints and tips on how to approach operational planning, see Developing an operational plan – hints and tips.pdf. For example of template operational plan, see Template operational plan.pdf.

Please refer to the the operational plan (here called a "business plan") of the UK Electoral Commission.  

2.2.2.4. Staff Objectives

It's important that your staff have objectives that make sense within the context of the overall organisational plan. This will enable them to see the link between the vision and their own personal contribution, and will ensure that everyone's efforts are moving you in the right direction. Naturally, staff will also have personal objectives related to their own development needs, and some of these may link more to their individual career aspirations. But try to make sure each member of staff has at least one or two objectives that reference the overall strategy. For example, an objective for a staff member tasked with giving advice and guidance might be set an objective of responding to all requests for advice within 3 days.

Achieving a vision is a whole-team effort. Discussing objectives is a good time to remind each staff member that everyone is working towards a common goal, and that what they do really matters.