Author: Financial Management Resource Bureau
The DLS Financial Management Resource Bureau (formerly the Technical Assistance Bureau) has offered financial management advice to municipalities across the state for over 30 years. To share this guidance more broadly, we thought it would be helpful to highlight some of our more useful, timely, or interesting recommendations for the benefit of City & Town readers.
Lewis Carroll is often quoted as saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going any road will do.” And while this quote doesn’t actually appear in any of his books, and Carroll himself celebrated aimlessness; all too often we see communities wrapped up in an exercise of putting out one fire to the next without a clear sense of direction. A municipality’s success doesn’t just happen, it takes work and an ability to adapt to changing conditions. So, with the new fiscal year upon us, we thought it was appropriate to outline how the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) is rethinking the traditional strategic planning and annual goal setting process to one that focuses on forward-thinking and continuous strategy development.
In its “Rethinking Budgeting Initiative”, GFOA highlights how important it is to think strategically in a volatile and resource constrained environment. However, rather than following a customary model of setting and periodically measuring goals, they suggest a rethinking that acknowledges that detailed plans have limited value because they quickly become outdated in a volatile, everchanging landscape. The pandemic, economic uncertainty, inflation, and massive federal assistance has only amplified this challenge and brought about a new normal that disrupted traditions and conventional ways of doing business. GFOA therefore points to a set of design principles that local governments can use to develop a nimble planning process that fits their particular conditions and set of circumstances.
GFOA makes the case that conventional “unwritten rules” around strategic planning, like developing a vision statement, curating annual goals, and developing detailed long-term priorities hobble the community because they can become immediately obsolete. Instead, the city or town should look to be more agile in the way it strategizes through a continuous process. The six design principles bulleted below are not “rules” as GFOA explains, but rather a framework from which to develop a planning process that works for your community.
- Accept uncertainty
- Define the problem before defining the solution
- Provide focus by introducing constraints
- Develop rolling planning process
- Make sure planning is collaborative
- Make sure planning is fair
Each of these design principles centers on developing an iterative strategic planning process that continually adapts to changing conditions. By accepting uncertainty, knowing that the past is no predictor of the future, focusing on core strategies, and rolling with the punches so to speak, the community can engineer a process not bound by conventional wisdom but flexibility and responsiveness to the everchanging local government landscape. To learn more about GFOA’s Rethinking Budget Initiative, visit www.gfoa.org/rethinking-budgeting.
Helpful Resources
City & Town is brought to you by:
Editor: Dan Bertrand
Editorial Board: Marcia Bohinc, Linda Bradley, Sean Cronin, Emily Izzo, Lisa Krzywicki and Tony Rassias
| Date published: | July 21, 2022 |
|---|