Strategic Planning Guide

Introduction

Strategic planning is a process that helps an agency clarify its most important goals, focus its attention and resources, and implement a framework for achieving meaningful results over time. The written strategic plan is a tool that employees and partners can use to inform and guide their day-to-day actions. 

In North Carolina, all state agencies are required to submit and use a strategic plan. The Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) oversees the updating of agency strategic plans. 

This website provides requirements, practical guidance, and additional resources for deploying a strategic plan across 2025–2029. (Or if preferred, here is a PDF version you can download.) Key dates include: 

How to Get Help and Feedback

For help on how to create your plan, OSBM provides trainings and coordinates technical assistance via Office Hours staffed by experts in strategic planning (Sign up for office hours with this link or click the icon below): 

Requirements of a Strategic Plan 

There are many ways to organize a strategic plan. OSBM provides a template commonly used by North Carolina agencies, or you can use a different format if preferred. Download a Word version of the template or use the icon to download: 

Either way, the following components should be included:

• A mission statement defining the agency’s current purpose—why it exists, what it does, and who it serves—in a single sentence.
• A vision statement declaring the agency’s aspirational future—what it ideally wants to achieve—in a single sentence.
• A list of 3-5 values that inspire and guide behavior within the agency.   
• A list of the agency’s goals—meaningful outcomes that an agency aims to achieve over the coming years. These might be written in more general descriptive terms or, better yet, as a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
• For each goal, a list of objectives—specific outcome targets the agency will pursue over the next 1-4 years in its attempt to achieve the goal. Objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.   
• For each goal and its associated objectives, performance measures—data and milestones that will be tracked to inform how well the agency is achieving objectives and, in turn, driving progress toward the realization of goals. This maps to the M in SMART.
• A list of 3-5 (or more) priority questions that, once answered, will inform future decision-making about how the agency pursues its strategic plan. 

See below for more details about each component. 

A goal is an outcome target that is generally broad and long-term while objectives define interim outcome targets that, as achieved, drive progress toward the overarching goal. 

Ideally goals and objectives (but definitely objectives) are written with outcomes that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Many agencies find it helpful to provide more detail than only the required components. You might consider, for example, describing activities you’ll undertake to achieve objectives (see Section E); providing a brief narrative overview of your agency’s history and purpose; a review of how progress was made (or not) against the previous strategic plan’s goals; a description of recent accomplishments and emerging challenges; or a note, if applicable, about how and why the mission or vision statement has been updated.    

How to Create a Strategic Plan

The strategic planning process requires reflection, discussion, and decision-making related to five questions: 

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to go?
3. How might we get there?
4. How do we evaluate our progress?
5. What do we need to learn?

There are many methods that can help create a strategic plan (see Appendix A at bottom of page). Your agency will likely use several methods, for different inputs into the process and for difference audiences. 

You should consider the following: 

• Review the statutory language that established your agency and what responsibilities are mandated by law.  
• Review the prior strategic plan. Ensure performance measures are up to date and assess how well (and why or why not) previous objectives and goals were achieved.  
• Review the agency budget. Assess where funding should be decreased, maintained, or increased.
• Review the agency organizational chart. Assess where changes should be made in reporting, job responsibilities, and headcount.
• Conduct SWOT and PESTLE analyses (see Appendix A).
• Administer an agency-wide staff survey, to invite feedback on how well the agency executed the prior strategic plan and to crowdsource ideas about how the strategic plan might be updated for 2025-2029.
• Facilitate an initial senior leadership discussion to align on a preliminary draft of mission, vision, values, and goals for the agency.  
• Facilitate discussion among deputy and division leadership to provide feedback on draft mission, vision, values, and goals; create objectives and performance measures for advancing each goal; and identify Priority Questions.
• Solicit a review of the penultimate draft Strategic Plan from peers or partners external to the agency.
• Finalize and widely circulate the Strategic Plan. 

Your agency should designate someone as responsible for overseeing the agency’s strategic planning process. Ensure this person is empowered to complete the task. Empowerment includes ready access to agency leadership and to resourcing required to complete activities (e.g. staff support to update performance measures; technical assistance to deploy and analyze a survey; funds to hire an outside facilitator).  

Components of a Strategic Plan

A strategic plan is more than a collection of statements and lists—it’s a framework that connects purpose, direction, and action. Each component of the plan plays a distinct role, but they are designed to work together as a coherent whole. See Appendix B below for a hypothetical example of the components. 

Mission, Vision, & Values     

These three components establish the foundation of your agency’s identity and culture:

• The mission defines your agency’s enduring purpose—why it exists, what it does, and who it serves. It grounds all activities in a clear and consistent reason for being.
• The vision describes the aspirational future your agency seeks to create. It offers a compelling picture of what success looks like if the agency’s efforts are effective over time.
• Values articulate the core principles and beliefs that guide behavior and decision-making. They shape how the agency executes its mission and moves toward its vision.

Together, these elements provide a common understanding about what your agency does, how it does it, and why it matters for the future of North Carolina.    

Goals, Objectives, & Performance Measures

These components translate the agency’s purpose and direction into action-oriented targets that can be managed against and monitored for tangible results:

• Goals are broad, long-term outcomes your agency aims to achieve. They reflect the key areas where progress is most needed or most impactful.
• Objectives are interim outcome targets that, as achieved, drive progress toward the overarching goal. They define what success looks like over the next one to four years and ensure efforts are focused and measurable.
• Performance measures are the tools used to track progress on objectives and goals. They provide the evidence needed to understand whether actions are working and to guide adjustments. 

Priority Questions

A challenge of strategic planning is that there is often uncertainty about the causes and consequences of an emerging issue, how policies and programs are currently performing, or what changes to policy and programming will improve performance.

It may be unclear, for example, whether program A or program B has a higher return-on-investment, or what are the impacts of regulation W, or how to best redesign and simplify an administrative process Z. If you had additional evidence to address such uncertainty, it could change whether your plan prioritizes A or B, or how budgetary resources are allocated toward W, or whether Z reforms are pursued or not—it could change, in other words, how you set and manage your efforts to achieve objectives and goals.

The Priority Questions section of the Strategic Plan is a prompt to identify 3-5 (or more) areas of uncertainty where additional evidence would be meaningful. The motivation for including this section is that strategic planning is not only a moment to set priorities based on the best available evidence of today, but it is also a key moment to invest attention and resources toward the generation of evidence that will be needed to design and implement solutions in the future. 

In other words, as you identify Priority Questions, your strategic planning should also set in motion and guide efforts to answer those questions. If helpful, OSBM offers technical assistance to identify options for how to answer Priority Questions and, via the NC Project Portal, fosters relationships with academic researchers who might partner with you to learn the answer. 

See Appendix C for prompts to help you identify Priority Questions.

Activities

Goals and objectives describe outcomes, while activities describe what you will do in the attempt to achieve those outcomes. Activities are actions, not outcomes. 

Activities are often not listed in a 4-year strategic plan, since activities frequently change and, from a management perspective, this level of detail is usually delegated to employees to sort out on smaller time scales, perhaps quarterly, monthly, or even bi-weekly. 

There may, however, be signature activities—including entirely new initiatives—that your agency wants to highlight explicitly in the strategic plan to raise awareness of the endeavor.  

Submitting the Strategic Plan

To submit your draft and final Strategic Plan to OSBM, please email it as a Word document to strategicplanning@osbm.nc.gov, with your agency’s OSBM Budget Development Analyst copied.

OSBM will publish all strategic plans in a centralized online location for easy reference.