Strategic Planning #8: Implementing the Plan

When you move from planner to implementer, you have to make the plan the guiding factor in all school operations.  Decisions must be made in relation to the plan.  This means that you have to communicate the plan to stakeholders.  When in the middle of tough financial decisions, you have to go back to the plan and trust that everyone is being guided by the plan.  The administrator has to ensure that people are familiar enough with th plan to minimize confusion about goals and strategies. 

Educational practices must follow the plan, and teachers need to make sure they abide by the plan.  It's only if you follow the plan that you'll know whether or not the plan is successful.  Wouldn't you hate to get to the end of a couple of years and not know whether low math scores were the result of a bad plan or non-conformance with the planned math program? 

Because of this, all priorities must be guided by the plan.  If you have to choose between teacher candidates, you have to make the decision based on how those candidates will work within the plan.  If you have to choose between desired curriculum supplements, you have to choose based on the plan.

You then have to measure based on the plan.  I've written other blogs on creating a measurement system that I compared to a GPS.  You have to measure according to where you thought you would be and if you aren't there, you need to know why.  You need to know if the plan is working and is just behind.  If you are ahead of plan, you want to know what made you so successful. Was it dumb luck?  Does your teaching strategy work better than you thought it would?  Did you hire better teachers than you thought you could?  What is the reason, not just are you better or worse than planned.

You need to know the reasons because you need to be able to rethink  and revise the plan.  In order to do that, you have to know what to revise.  You don't want to have to guess. 

Implementation is the most difficult part of the process because you  have to get beyond your great ideas and actually make them reality.  Each step of the strategy has to be outlined and followed.  Tracking the plan is not easy, but it's the most important part.